


Made a Meal Out Of Me (and come back for more)

by justanotherStonyfan



Series: Banned Together Fills [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Play, Anal Plug, Anal Sex, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes can choose their genitalia, Edging, Hand Jobs, Horny Bucky Barnes, Horny Steve, M/M, Magic, Masturbation, Nipple Play, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Sex Toys, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Frustration, Sparring, Steve Rogers has Self-Esteem Issues, Worldbuilding, incubus Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:46:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28640229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: Because the thing is, Bucky’s away from him. What Bucky needs when Bucky gets back ismore of the good stuff, and the thing about the good stuff is that Steve can provide it, sure. But Bucky says it’s like fine wine - better aged.Which is a really romantic, kind of poetic way of saying, the longer Steve’s horny, the better he tastes to his incubus husband.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Mentions of casual Steve/Other, Mentions of casual Steve/Thor, mentions of Bucky/OCs
Series: Banned Together Fills [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1825168
Comments: 34
Kudos: 150
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Made a Meal Out Of Me (and come back for more)

**Author's Note:**

> This is to fill my "Blasphemy" BTB2020 square, because I'd imagine fucking a demon counts.

There are three days left. 

Three days, and the reminders are in his goddamn phone and people at least know better than to make fun of him right now. Even Nat knows better.

In fact, God help him, Nat knows enough to make it worse (better? No, no definitely worse). 

It’s a Sunday, and Steve still finds himself looking guiltily at his calendar whenever Sunday rolls around - church is a little beyond them both these days, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about ‘after.’ ‘After,’ the way he and Bucky were raised to think of it, doesn’t exist. And whatever there really is ‘After,’ given that a good part of Bucky comes from it, Steve knows he’ll be safe. After all, out of the two of them, it’s Bucky who’s spent time there, Bucky who, really, can call it home. 

So Steve’s not worried about dying, at the very least. And, what’s more, he’s getting a little more out of life now he’s got that knowledge on his side - there _is_ an After, he and Bucky _will_ be together in it, they _won’t_ be condemned for loving each other. He can live his life to the fullest witshowt fear that it’s all he’s got, and he’s got Bucky with him. So he’s not in any _hurry_ to get to the After, either. 

The only thing he’s in a hurry for is Bucky getting back. With Very Good Reason, Steve’s no longer allowed on missions with Bucky. Either Bucky drains Steve (making Steve useless), or he doesn’t, leaving Bucky in a haze (making Bucky useless). They can sort of function separately so they get around it by making sure Bucky get regular Feeds, and Steve’s rested. Usually, Steve can recover in a night. They fuck every day, at least once - of course they do. Both their libidos are enhanced - but Bucky doesn’t Feed every day unless he’s leaving, because he’ll need his strength. So here’s how it works:

If Steve’s leaving on a mission, he loads up on nutrients and stimulation, and gives Bucky what he can in the lead up, to tide him over until the mission’s done. Bucky will take what Steve can spare and then spend most of his time inert without Steve there, instead of wasting what Steve’s provided. 

If Bucky’s leaving on a mission, they meal prep, and then Bucky feeds as often as he can for the few days before he goes, and then he leaves. Steve stays pretty much comatose for the first few days he’s gone, and then wakes up and goes about his life until Bucky’s back. In theory.

Problem is, Steve spent the first three days of Bucky’s mission in the nest Bucky’s made of the bed pit - more cushions than Steve’s had hot meals, quilts and fabrics strewn about, hung from the ceiling and the walls, lights, fragrances - it’s terrible, Steve thinks. _Terrible._ Because he could live in the nest for the rest of his life. He’s supposed to be Strong And Brave and whatnot, you know, doing all the justice and freedom stuff, but sometimes it’s all too easy to drift along with the cloud of _s a t i s f i e d_ that Bucky leaves him on. He sleeps, he eats the food they put together before Bucky left (because Steve is in no state to make food) and, from time to time, he wakes up, or gets up, (or rolls over,) and has some water. 

The _problem_ comes about four days after Bucky leaves - when the fuzzy feeling fades and the satisfaction in his bones stops melting into his blood and just evaporates entirely. 

Because the thing is, Bucky’s away from him. What Bucky needs when Bucky gets back is _more of the good stuff_ , and the thing about the good stuff is that Steve can provide it, sure. But Bucky says it’s like fine wine - better aged. 

Which is a really romantic, kind of poetic way of saying, the longer Steve’s horny, the better he tastes to his incubus husband. 

And Steve has three whole days to kill before Bucky gets back. Three days where the best thing he can do for Bucky is get so worked up he can barely sleep, and then…

Stop.

***

Steve is always, always, caught between loving and hating the days before Bucky comes back.

His dick is _right there_. If he couldn’t think about it, if he had to distract himself and do other stuff, that would be fine - he’s the public face of the Avengers, technically the leader of at least two rotation teams, and he’s their primary liaison for most other organizations. It’s not like he’s got nothing to do. But, instead, he’s got his full workload to contend with _and_ what Bucky lovingly refers to as Mortal Meal Prep, because Bucky is an Idiot and Steve loves him very much. 

He runs the tips of his fingers up the underside of his dick and bites his lip.

It’s, for the most part, not really an issue - he’s not gonna pop a boner in the middle of a meeting with high-ranking military personnel, not about to need to will his dick to behave halfway through a tour of some facility or other, he won’t be crossing his legs while answering questions in a press conference. 

Rubbing the front of his jeans with the heel of his hand while warming up a tub of Bruce’s best I-Learned-This-In-Kolkata Kosha Mangsho is more like it (because the best time to eat curry is when there’s nobody around whose general wellbeing depends on fucking Steve within an inch of his life), or readjusting his semi while writing a report. He wakes up from a power-nap to find himself face-down and lovingly grinding against the bed pit’s mattress (it’s not Steve’s fault Bucky filled the bed pit with crap including an abundance of body-pillows, it’s not Steve’s fault all the body pillows smell like _Bucky_ ) and, sometimes, if he really wants to hate himself, he hitches himself up against the sticky-out corner of the counter-top and rubs against that for a little bit, hands flat on the granite, eyes closed.

He’s not an animal, he can control it, but when he’s alone he can _be_ an animal about it if he wants, and knowing it’s the best thing for Bucky, too means that, on the evening of day three (as in three, two, one, _go_ ), Steve almost doesn’t feel mortified to be splayed out naked in a big patch of golden sunlight, that’s reflecting into the bed pit from the Chrysler building, with his fingertips on the underside of his dick as it strains up into the air. 

He’s been edging for the last twenty minutes - and considering the serum makes him sensitive enough that he can come in seconds sometimes, that’s no mean feat - lying naked in the bed pit with his knees out as far as he can get them and his toes curled in the bedding, and his poor, desperate dick bright red and sopping wet, orgasm waiting in his blood. He is _So. Close._

Bucky’s gonna wreck him when he gets home, that’s what happens - he’ll leave Steve pretty much a drooling mess after spending hours taking him apart because the thing about incubi is that the more pleasure their victim is in, the more energy the incubus gets, and Bucky’s got decades of experience and a partner who’s much less a victim and more like an accomplice. But Bucky is about two days and twelve hours from coming home, and Steve is about a hair’s breadth from coming. He’s been playing with his nipples, too, because why wouldn’t he if he’s trying to edge, and they’re hard, and they’re puffy, and he was pinching them and twisting them before but now all he has to do is brush one with his thumb to make himself wince. His cock gives another blurt of precome as he does, and he whines through his teeth - the sting of it settles heavy in the root of his dick, the head of it tingling, and it really-

He knows he’s doing this himself, knows _why_ he’s doing it himself and what he’ll get if he just keeps doing what he’s supposed to do, but damn is it ever difficult. 

He won’t use toys until the morning Bucky’s meant to be back - he usually just buzzes himself up into a frenzy and waits for Bucky to walk in on scheduled return days - but he’s seriously considering that nice ribbed plug Bucky bought him - the one with the bulbs down the length and the nice, narrow base, curved just so. He smears the precome over the head of his cock with his thumb, and scrapes his teeth over his lower lip as he arches his back - all he has to do when he’s wearing that plug is just clench down and it’s designed _just right_ that he can just lie still with it in, clenching down over and over, building the pleasure from the inside without even needing his hands. 

He has to be careful if he does - if he gets too close he has to lie completely still with it in until he can stand to remove it, otherwise he just ruins his own orgasm and negates the whole point (and he learned that one the hard way, him and Bucky both), but that’s not for today. 

Today is for edging and watching blue movies and fantasizing and maybe fingering himself if he feels like it, sitting in the living room fully dressed and getting hard and not doing anything about it.

Tomorrow he’ll ‘self-care’ because Bucky likes it when Steve’s pleasure gets what he calls ‘loving notes,’ and apparently those notes are stronger if Bucky’s not the only one loving Steve. So Steve does his best to love himself at least some of the time, and that includes cookies and hot chocolate, and taking a nice bubble bath, and painting sometimes, too. Bucky can tell if he’s been stressed by something other than separation and arousal, so Steve’s willing to do what he can to dial down the stress so that he tastes better to Bucky, regardless of how weird it always feels to be neck-deep in suds and warm water while remembering what it was like to share a stove-heated-water bath in a tin tub. 

And then day one he’ll prep for Bucky coming home - clean the toys, tidy the bed pit, make sure there’s food on hand, practice what he’s going to say and how he’s going to lie and lots of fun stuff like that.

Steve’s learned, over the years, not to be mortified. Okay, he’s learn to mostly ignore being mortified. Before Bucky came back to him, he was what Clint affectionately referred to as “the Team Bicycle,” which is a _little_ inaccurate given that Steve was more discerning than that. He was more like “Close Friends Bicycle” - everyone got a ride if he could trust them to keep their mouths shut about it. Sometimes more than one person at once. But still, mostly accurate nonetheless.

It’s sometimes still an issue, depending on how long Bucky’s going to be away for - having a boyfriend who not only has a libido that can keep up with yours (instead of needing two or three teammates to match him stroke for stroke) but requires that you use it for his survival means that, even now, there are times when Steve’s hand just isn’t going to cut it, provided he doesn’t need to store it up for Bucky.

Other times, times like this, Steve just turns off the little voice he grew up with - the one that came from a book and sat in a pew and told him he shouldn’t like the things he likes - and does what feels good.

Because it turns out that Steve likes a lot of things he wouldn’t have thought he’d like, including something Bucky calls not-exhibitionism. Steve knows there are no cameras on their floor, no bugs, knows the windows are only transparent from the inside. He knows that, when he’s alone on their floor, he’s alone on their floor. Still, while walking around naked is no problem, edging in front of the window makes his heart beat faster, makes it a little less easy to stop before he comes. Getting in certain positions on the bed to masturbate in is a little more thrilling than lying flat on his back and closing his eyes, and imagining the picture he’d make if Bucky came home right now…

So that’s the plan for the next few days.

In between all of that, he’s got two briefings and a Sesame Street appearance, plus a-

“… _O-h_ God…”

\- a, he has a…there’s a…

 _God_ his dick his so hard.

He whines in the back of his throat, tips his head back and shoves his hips up because maybe that will at least get rid of a little of the tension in his spine, but he has to wind the fingers of both hands in the bedsheets to stop himself grabbing for his dick because it’s hard and curving upwards like it’s always done, and the head is red and wet, and Steve sometimes wishes he could auto-fellate but he can’t (he tried), not even with super flexibility. He can parkour, he can poledance, but he can’t suck his own dick. 

“Fuck’s sake,” he mutters through gritted teeth - what he’d give for a suckjob from Bucky right now. “Fu-uck I miss you,” and he doesn’t _just_ miss Bucky for his forked tongue, prehensile tail, and incubus dick, but those are certainly _some_ of the things he misses, even with Sesame Street looming. 

He’s.

Aw, shit, he’s thinking about Elmo. 

Bucky, Buckybuckybucky, think about Bucky instead, the way he looks in his soldier leathers with his arm, or maybe the-

Steve swallows hard, the span of his huge, leathery wings when he lets Steve see them, how about that? Fuck yeah. There’s something really sexy about it, about being as big as Steve is (’yuge,’ as Barton likes to say if Barton wants to get punched, great, now he’s thinking about Barton,) about being six-two and all-muscle and having Bucky, who used to be a head taller than him and is now a good couple inches shorter than him, _grow_ right in front of him. 

Bucky is bigger than him - a _lot_ bigger than him.

There are two stages of Big, though Bucky can technically manage anything from regular-sized all the way up to Full-On-Demon, but the one he rolls out for Steve’ enjoyment is Big Bucky. 

When Bucky’s being Big Bucky, he’s like a person and a half and that means that, if Bucky wants to pull the rest of his…metaphysical matter in from the…the alternate, uh…

Steve wraps the fingers of one hand around himself and presses against the root of his dick with the other and just strokes and it feels _so good_ \- it’s duller pleasure than teasing, a sweeping sensation of building pleasure instead of the sting of barely-there-and-staunchly-withheld, and he lets his toes curl in the soft cotton, lets his legs fall open against the myriad of cushions and pillows and pictures Bucky Big.

Bucky’s a person and a half when Steve asks him to be Big Bucky for fun. When Bucky pulls his wings in from the sister dimension and is Big for Steve, they fill the room - they have to. Nobody ever considers how big wings have to be if they’re going to lift someone person-sized, especially when that ‘person size’ is as big as Bucky. Plus, Buck’s got hollow bones made of, Steve doesn’t know, steel or some shit probably? He’s light as a feather and hasn’t even bruised punching the shield, so he’s at least able to contend with vibranium. 

And, usually, being the Winter Soldier at a Person-And-A-Half size is enough but, occasionally, he’s broken out the Full On Demon, which is just about when people get really fucking weird about seeing him. A person and a half is just a big guy, but a dude who’s a little over Hulk-sized but still human proportioned? With wings and horns and pointed teeth and black eyes-

It’s called F-O-D on the team comms and, okay, Steve’s been conditioned to find him attractive at F-O-D just like he’s been conditioned to provide for him, he can’t help it, but for everyone else, well. Bad guys cower, good guys wonder if they’ve accidentally shrunk, and Steve always (fucking always) wonders if he could take Bucky in his real form. In any and all senses of the word. It _is_ weird to have Bucky, Bucky he grew up with, Bucky he loves, Bucky who looks like a regular human being most of the time, look like Scott’s hit him with the Pym particles _just enough_ that he has to duck his head to stand in the apartment’s high-ceilinged living room, but it’s incredible. He’s beautiful.

But he’s not under any illusions - if Bucky weren’t on Steve’s side, Steve would be _screwed._ Metaphorically. Which is not nearly as fun as what he’ll actually get when Bucky comes home, if Steve asks nicely. Because, if Steve asks nicely, Bucky will make himself person-and-a-half big (Steve once babbled ‘Big Buck’ in the middle of getting _reamed_ and Bucky’s never let him forget it, and that’s where the name comes from) and show Steve his wings and manhandle Steve the way nobody else can (Thor can come close - which Steve very happily learned by doing. Six months into the future, he'd been dying for someone who could keep up, and Thor was very definitely it - but Thor's still no Bucky) and something Steve loves above everything else that Bucky does for him is the way Bucky looms over Steve, blocking out the light with his wings, teeth sharp, hands-

Steve’s alarm goes off suddenly enough that it makes him startle, and even though he would have had to stop in five seconds anyway, he still swears a blue streak.

His dick is just standing there, happy as a clam.

“Not today, kiddo,” Steve mutters, trying not to picture his dick with a sad face (Steve already has a sad face, his dick doesn’t need one too- it’s too late, he’s picturing it - little mushroom with a ‘:(’ in probably sharpie, how is this Steve’s thought process five seconds from orgasm? Actually, he can be real with himself, being five seconds from orgasm is _exactly why_ this is his thought process).

He reaches out and slaps his phone to stop the alarm, okay, okay, he’s up. In _all senses of the word._ Which means it’s time for a cold shower, and he’s not kidding - not much else will do it at this point besides an ice-pack, but an ice-pack is for emergencies only - and a cold shower is why, less than five minutes later, he’s yelling,

“Fu- _hoh-_ Je- ha- _eeezus CHRIST!”_ into an empty apartment.

At least Bucky and his sensitive ears aren’t around to hear _that_.

~

Dinner is. Food. 

Food is all it is for a little while because Steve forgets what he’s having in favor of thinking about the terrible wonderful things Bucky’s going to do to him (thinking about jerking off becomes thinking about jerking off with Bucky’s eyes on him and Bucky’s mouth on his balls becomes thinking about a rim job becomes thinking about face-down-ass-up-groaning-into-the-pillows-while-Bucky-eats-him-out) until-

Oh, yeah, curry - Bruce even gave him some parathas to freeze to eat with it, and somewhere he’s got apricot jam he can sub for mango chutney and shut up, he knows, ‘millions of cooks turning over in their casserole dishes‘ or whatever but he’s hungry, and Bruce’s curry is-

God, it’s so good. 

He starts defrosting it in the microwave (future!) and it starts to smell rightfully delicious within about forty seconds. He makes some tea to drink with it because Bruce gave him that too, so why not have the whole meal on Bruce? Steve can’t remember if he’s got any Kulfi left but he’s eating it for dessert if he has and he’ll find something else if he doesn’t. In fact, he’s checking the freezer - if he doesn’t have any ice-cream, he knows there’s heavy cream in the refrigerator, and he’s dangerously close to the ‘fuck it’ period of Bucky being awa-

There’s Kulfi, good, he won’t have to chug the cream. 

He’s wearing trousers because he’s about to eat and, unless Bucky’s with him, eating naked feels lazy and foolhardy (hot food and no dick covering? Superhealing or no, he’s not risking that one) but the trousers he picked are jeans because the fly’s nice and stiff and he can grind against it without too much trouble. He doesn’t wear a shirt because he can’t be bothered finding the apron and he’s willing to drop hot curry on his chest if not his dick, so he’d rather drop it on wipe-clean skin than possibly-stained-forever shirt. 

Which means, when he settles on the couch, one leg over the arm to take a little pressure off, he’s got a full serving-bowl-size bowl of curry and the various accoutrements Steve’s been spoiled into wanting with curry. First time he had curry, it was from a pizza place that Clint liked, with some weird crackers and a polystyrene cup of oozy neon orange stuff. Now, Steve gets Bruce’s homemade curry with homemade parathas, alongside a stack of papads he can fry into papadums himself, plus mango chutney, plus raita, plus a handful of raisins because he wanted them. And he knows that certain things are meant to go with certain dishes, he knows that some of what he likes is south Asian and some of what he likes is-

Listen, he was frozen for seventy years and the most interesting thing he ate back in his own time, outside of a _half an orange every Christmas in Brooklyn,_ was croissants in France, or spiced sausage in Germany. So, at thirty-two years of age, if he wants to mix all the things he likes into one delicious family-sized bowl of _awesome_ because his body’s burning energy like a wildfire, he’s damn well gonna do it. He gets his wires crossed halfway through and starts thrusting up against the denim fly of his jeans just 'cause it tastes so good, and then he’s moaning into a mouthful of Kosha Mangsho (does he have cashews somewhere? There must be cashews _somewhere_ ) and only really twigs what he’s doing when his dick starts to chafe.

That’s fine, it means he’ll be aware of it for the next hour or so while the chafing heals up, and then he‘s got a chunk of time set aside for maybe fingering himself but he’ll probably just leave it at getting on all fours and rubbing his fingers over his asshole until he’s so sensitive he’s precome a wet patch onto the sheets. So a relatively boring evening then. Bucky’s fingerprints are about twice as defined as his own are, a little more raised, a little less soft - when Bucky strokes his asshole it’s like a ribbed condom for how sensitive the skin there is.

Steve’s toes curl in the carpet. At this rate he’s not going to finish his curry.

He drops a hand to his jeans and readjusts, gives his dick a squeeze through the denim and has to shut his eyes when he does. The ache is amazing, like stretching out a cramp, but he leaves it be after that. 

It used to embarrass him, how he felt about doing this, how his body reacted. But then he realized he was doing it for Bucky, mostly, (although it’s not like Steve gets nothing from it, obviously,) and he made sure there was no surveillance anywhere (Bucky can tell, Bucky just _knows_ ) and Steve’s queer as fuck so he can appreciate a nice set of abs, a good looking set of fingers, some nice, defined calves, even when they all happen to be attached to himself. 

When curry’s done, he eats the remainder of the Kulfi with the container set in his lap to damp Steve Jr’s excitement a little. It works for exactly as long as he has the Kulfi in his lap, and then the bottom of the container’s melted by the time he gets there, so he drinks that and then heads back to the bedroom to shuck his jeans and get on all fours and spread his knees far enough that he can rub the head of his dick against the mattress while he gets his hole nice and sopping wet. 

~

Night is easier. 

And the best thing about this particular mission is Bucky’s on the same(ish) hours as Steve, so they’re sleeping at roughly the same time. 

It’s difficult now to remember what it was like before Bucky showed up at night but the thing is, incubi work a certain way - they come to you while you sleep, traditionally, and manipulate you from the dream realm, but eating requires an in-person connection. Giving someone a wet dream and feeding off the energy while they’re asleep is for necessary incubus survival but, given that Bucky needs to be present to feed, it wouldn’t make much sense to give Steve a wet dream from wherever he is right now.

Still, the bond they share means he can manipulate Steve’s dreams anyway, so Steve gets to go to sleep with his limbs wrapped around a body pillow and slip straight into-

_“Wondering when you were gonna show,” Bucky says, and he’s being himself from Before, sitting in their old apartment building in his work shirt and pants, suspenders off his shoulders, hair slicked back by Brylcreem - Steve can smell it - and Bucky’s lips are red, so definitely a dream and not a memory. Steve’s memories are still colorblind._

_Steve smiles, glances down at himself - short, skinny, but he could have told you that from how high above him the cupboards are._

_“Oh?” he says. “You wanted a little Original Me tonight, huh?”_

_Bucky quirks an eyebrow and then gets up and comes over._

_“I don’t care what shape you’re in,” Bucky says, and that’s true - he’s-_

_Oh, he’s taller in this dream than he was when Steve was really this size, he’s making himself into Big Buck even though Steve’s still small._

_It’s true though, Bucky can make the dreamscape what he wants. Steve remembers one time Bucky tried out giving Steve the wings and tail, another time when he changed Steve’s anatomy - Bucky’s got enough experience shapeshifting, and enough experience from memories harvested from feeding, to be able to manipulate Steve’s reality into whatever he wants while Steve’s sleeping. And even though Steve’s happy with what he was born with, having a clitoris that one time was a hell of an experience - he still remembers watching Bucky’s forked tongue play with the little pink nub and being _blown away_. Having Bucky’s huge hands cupping breasts that he did not know could feel so warm and soft and sensitive was a _definite_ plus, too._

_Bucky undoes Steve’s shirt buttons one by one and brushes his fingernails from Steve’s sternum, out over his nipple, to push back the cotton. It’s cool in here so Steve’s nipples pull tight pretty much instantly, and he winces because they’re sensitive and his body wants what it can’t have right now._

_“What do you feel like?” Bucky asks. “You want a ride on the Sybian?”_

_“You put me on that thing and I’m done,” Steve answers - because they’ve never had one but, before he and Steve were reunited, Bucky once fed from a woman who had one, and the pleasure information he tucked away from her mind became a favorite manipulation of Steve’s._

_Bucky once put him in one of those Venus things, too - the automated dick-pump - at the same time. Steve remembers the suggestion and the agreeing to do it, and remembers the setup before they started but, to be quite honest, he doesn’t remember much about the actual event beyond the way his whole body tightens up with _YES_ at the thought, and the rawness of his throat afterward from the literal screaming orgasm that resulted. Bucky can evidently tell because he chuckles. Maybe Steve’ll ask for that when Bucky gets home because that’s the other advantage to Bucky’s ability to follow him into unconsciousness - even when Steve passes out, Bucky can follow him right down and they can keep going as long as Steve is consenting (and boy is he ever, enthusiastically). _

_“Hmm, and how are we today?” Bucky asks - he might be Bucky Barnes circa 1935 right now, but his teeth are all incubus - and he strokes the backs of his fingers up the length of Steve’s cock because, huh, Steve’s dick is out of his pants now, okay. “Poor thing.”_

_Steve lets his eyes drift shut and his head go back against the-_

_Mattress, on top of their squeaky box-springs. He’s naked, he can feel the silk-_

_“Oh, silk?” he says, smirking as he opens his eyes again._

_They’re both naked now, stretched out on their old creaky bed, except it’s firm and covered in silk and it isn’t squeaky or lopsided because Bucky’s making it perfect. The room’s definitely their tenement bedroom, but it’s out of focus - and not just because Steve had bad eyes when he was this small._

_“Only the best for my favorite meal,” Bucky answers, and Steve laughs._

_“You asshole.”_

_Bucky laughs too, leaning over him, propped up on an elbow as he strokes his fingers through Steve’s hair. He’s still got his claws out because he knows Steve likes the way they whisper across his skin, and looming over Steve is way more effective when he’s making himself this big._

_“What’ve you been up to today?” he asks, as though he doesn’t know Steve’s routine backwards._

_Steve takes a deep breath in through his nose._

_“Conference,” he says, thinking about the faux-mahogany table in Stark’s conference room, and the big high-backed chairs._

_Steve’s on his back with Bucky and so the conference room and its furniture appear on the ceiling instead, as though they were looking down on it from above - table, chairs, Steve-in-the-memory dressed in his black shirt and gray slacks, the top of his dirty-blond hair all spiked upward. Everyone else is just shapes._

_No sooner has the table appeared than Bucky projects the image of the two of them naked and fucking on it, Steve on his back with his head over Bucky’s shoulder, legs around Bucky’s waist with Bucky driving into him. Conference room Steve is talking about numbers and statistics, and the Steve and Bucky fucking on the table don’t make any sound, a muted fantasy playing over the top of Steve’s memory. Bucky’s projection of Steve opens his mouth and gives an obvious cry but it’s silent, and so Steve pushes the pictures of the conference room and the two of them fucking aside in his head, so it’s just their tenement ceiling again. In the split second before he does, the him getting fucked on the table looks straight at him with a knowing smirk, and Steve feels himself blush._

_“Curry,” he says, and he can smell it again - he puts it on the bedside table for Bucky to see. He puts a glass of lassi there, too, because wishful thinking._

_“And what else?” Bucky asks._

_“Oh, you mean meal prep?” Steve says, as faux innocently as he’s able to manage. “Well, I thought about your dick for half an hour and then I got bored.”_

_Bucky trails his fingernails down Steve’s chest and then runs the tips of his fingers up the underside of Steve’s dick just like Steve did._

_“Did you now?” Bucky asks, his voice low and smoky._

_“No,” Steve answers. “I missed you every second. I watched porn and fucked my fist, and I edged for half an hour before I ate-”_

_He projects that hard enough to change the room around them, to be lying where he was lying except with Bucky by his side, and somehow having his knees out wide don’t get in the way of Bucky being right next to him. Steve loves the dreamscape, and he indicates his hard-on with his hand._

_“And it still wasn’t any fun without you.”_

_“Hmm,” Bucky says, and they both look at Steve’s wet, red dick. “How about-”_

_Steve keens without meaning to - Bucky’s put a vibrator in him._

_“Fuck,” Steve says, but it’s loud and drawn out and, almost as soon as he’s been given the vibrator, Bucky takes it away._

_“What else?” Bucky asks, audibly amused._

_“Fuck you,” Steve answers breathlessly, opening his eyes because he closed them, but he’s already thinking about it, and that means Bucky’s already receiving it, and then the room’s spinning around him and he’s on all fours with his dick leaking precome on the mattress, and Bucky’s well-defined fingerprints smearing lube all over his asshole. “Oh fuck.”_

_“You’re doing pretty good for me, huh?” Bucky asks, and Steve can feel Bucky _breathing_ on his exposed asshole, hot breath on his balls and the inside of his thighs. “Shame you gotta wait, really.”_

_“Ugh,” Steve says, and flops sideways onto the-_

_-tenement bed again. Bucky often likes to bring them back here._

_“What about you?” he asks. “What’ve you been doing today?”_

_“Ah, the usual,” Bucky says, leaning over him again._

_‘Behind’ him, on the tenement ceiling, a grainy black and white newsreel of snatches of Nat and Sam and Bucky plays without sound, cheesy music weaving unsteadily in the air, as well as the click of the projector echoing too much in their small room. The announcer speaks a moment later._

‘Captain America fights alongside his trusty sidekicks the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier! Against the odds, and when all else fails, our intrepid heroes save the day yet again!’

__

_“Another day in the life,” Bucky tells him._

_Steve snorts and reaches up to pull Bucky down for a kiss._

__

‘But what’s this, folks!? The Winter Soldier’s beautiful partner is a ripped blond twink!?’ __

__

_Steve breaks the kiss by accident, laughing so hard Bucky winces, but Bucky’s grinning too._

_“That’s terrible,” Steve says. “God, you’re the worst.”_

_Steve’s never heard words like that in a voice like a picture newsreel._

_Above him, on the ceiling, the newsreel fades to a ‘That’s All, Folks,’ card and the Looney Tunes music plays instead, still in black and white - Steve shakes his head, feeling how wide his smile is, and kisses Bucky nice and slow instead while the film skips off the end of the reel and flaps about - Steve can hear it. Then there’s different music, too, something soft and quiet - Mrs Gill’s radio playing through the wall like it used to. When Steve opens his eyes, the sun has moved - it’s evening in their little Brooklyn bedroom, and Bucky’s right there with him, nothing but love in his eyes._

_“Sleep,” Bucky says, by which he means he’s going to pull out of Steve’s conscious subconscious and let Steve’s mind dream by itself, the way it should. “I’m up an hour before you. I’ll pull you back before I go.”_

_Steve purses his lips._

_“It hurts, you know,” he says softly, hand in Bucky’s hair._

_Bucky lets it be a little longer under Steve’s fingers - fluffy and just washed instead of trimmed and Brylcreemed._

_“I know,” he says, because he does - even if Bucky couldn’t share his mind, it hurts just as much for each of them to be apart as it does for the other. “Sleep.”_

_Steve takes a slow breath and sighs heavily._

_“Yeah,” he says. “You’re staying?”_

_Bucky kisses him again._

_“I’m staying,” he says, and then lets go of Steve a little to let Steve turn onto his side. “Little spoon.”_

_“Shut up,” Steve says, but he’s smiling._

_They take turns at which spoon they are, given that Steve’s bigger than normal Bucky and Big Buck is bigger than Steve. But, like this, he sleeps easier. With Bucky just Bucky, and Steve how he used to be. He doesn’t miss the pain or the struggle but, like this, in their old tenement, pressed together and safe from the world is when he best knows what it feels like to be home._

***

_“Morning, sweetheart,” Bucky says, rousing him with kisses on the back of his neck._

_For a moment he’s confused about where he is and where Bucky is, and the room swims blurrily between the tower and their tenement, but then the tenement snaps into place and Steve squints in the morning sunlight._

_“Hmm?” he says, and Bucky’s hand sweeps down his flank._

_“I have to go,” he says. “And your alarm’s gonna go in about two minutes.”_

_That’s the thing about the dreamscape. An hour, two minutes, no difference._

_“No,” Steve says. “I’m sleeping through it. I’m not leaving, I’m gonna sleep the day away.”_

_Bucky laughs._

_“Have fun,” he says, and pulls back as he jerks his head towards the window. “We’re moving out.”_

_“Mhhh, wait,” Steve says, and turns onto his back to kiss Bucky goodbye. “I love you.” And then, because he’s feeling that way out: “Say hi from me.”_

_“Absolutely,” Bucky says, and bobs his eyebrows - he’ll do it because Sam thinks it’s creepy as fuck. And then he kisses Steve and stands, suddenly fully dressed. “Love you too. I’ll see you tonight,” he says, and walks out of the bedroom._

_Steve hears the front door of their tenement slam, for his benefit because they’ve found that his heart aches less if they treat it like any other parting, and he can’t help picturing Bucky going off to the docks down the old sidewalks, past the old stores, in their old world. That’s the point, he supposes._

_He buries his head in pillows that smell of the two of them and then lifts his head and-_

squints at his phone where it’s whinging on the edge of the bedpit.

“Ugh,” he says, and flops back into the pillows.

~

He showers, a nice warm one this time, and uses the opportunity to spray warm water on his dick for a while. It’s up against his stomach by the time he’s soaped his hair, and he can’t decide if it’s more likely a conditioned response to the really nice sensation of fingers in his hair (regardless of whose apparently) or a conditioned response to rubbing soap over his chest (because he’s at a point now where his nipples are sensitive regardless of what he’s doing), or maybe it’s knowing that he’s going to put conditioner in his body hair that does it. Whatever actually does it, his dick stands up for its usual good-morning rubdown, except that absent-Bucky days are different, unfortunately - no rubdown will be forthcoming. But Steve doesn’t have to neglect his poor dick entirely (for now), so he leans back against the nice cool tiles and spreads his legs, and directs very light, nicely warm water at his dick and his balls, and pretends he’s washing the conditioner out of his pubic hair while warm, soft pleasure curls low in his stomach and high in the tops of his thighs. It’s nice, it’s a real lazy-day kind of pleasure, like when Bucky feels particularly like spending a whole afternoon pulling him apart slowly. 

The thing about incubi is that they feed off pleasure. So Steve and Bucky have sex plenty - it’s not like Bucky doesn’t enjoy sex. Bucky likes having his dick sucked and his knot squeezed, and he likes having his ass played with and he likes having his nipples clamped. And by likes, Steve means he comes plenty when the sex is reciprocal, thanks. Bucky likes surprise blowjobs and drawn-out sex play, and they’re in a mutually satisfying, very healthy, very vigorously loving relationship.

And, the thing about Steve and Bucky is, they could eat competitively. In fact, they’d be banned from eating competitively because they can eat more food than should be possible, but Bucky likes sweet things and spicy things - he likes curry and cake and ice-cream and chilli and chocolate and chilli chocolate, and they’ll eat food off each other, of course they will, but Steve will also poach eggs to have on toast with freshly-brewed coffee on a Saturday morning, or make stir-fry with a new recipe he found online for an evening meal, and Bucky will make four pans of cornbread because cornbread is _so good_.

So they can have enjoyable sex together, and eat enjoyable meals together. 

But Bucky can’t _Feed_ unless Steve’s enjoying himself. 

If Bucky tries to suck Steve off while he’s having a mental breakdown, Bucky’s going to get tongue-cramp and no energy, and Steve’s going to get pissed. It’s a metaphor, obviously, Bucky would never try and suck Steve off while Steve’s having a mental breakdown, just like he wouldn’t try and fuck Steve in his sleep without actually going into Steve’s sleep to ask, first, they’re not idiots. But broadly speaking, if Steve’s not having fun, Bucky isn’t getting fed. And the best way to satisfy the broadest spectrum of survival-urges Bucky has is for Bucky to do his absolute best to give Steve the best orgasms he can possibly have. Now that Steve’s enormous body has gifted him a little-engine-that-can-and-can-and-can-and-

“Ohn,” he says, wincing, tugging against his balls with one hand, just a little.

Partially it’s to prolong what’s he’s doing but there’s also a subtle ache beginning. Being a supersoldier means that, in a couple of days, he’s gonna go of like a rocket. A very messy rocket. Still, that’s why everything in the bed pit is washable, and why they have a mattress cover, and really it’s a fine line between holding back and letting go. It took a good few missions for them to work out how far in advance Steve could start cultivating his pleasure for Bucky’s return, and they had plenty of laundry loads and half-meals and ruined orgasms in between. So today he’s due for nice, gentle things and self-indulgences, which he’ll be getting straight to after Sesame Street. 

He wiggles the showerhead a little to move the flow of water over his dick a little more, but he has to get moving soon. Tomorrow he’s got those two briefings, and cookie monster waits for no man.

He really, really needs to stop thinking about muppets while he’s trying to concentrate on his dick.

***

The Sesame Street guys are really great, seriously. Steve’s not there as Captain America given that Sam’s Captain America now, but he gets to show up and help in a couple of skits - making terrible Spanish puns with Rosita (and getting besos), talking to Abby about Working As A Team with different people, helping the Count count erasers and doing a little drawing of him on camera, the usual.

It’s about as fun an afternoon as he can have, he’s not under any illusions about how lucky he is. One of the best things about being an Avenger has been Sesame Street. The puppeteers stay in character as much as possible, and crack him up as often as they can. It’s easy to forget there are people eight feet down - nobody even makes fun of guests when they talk to the puppets and not the puppeteers. What’s more, everyone is so kind. 

The first time he appeared on Sesame Street, he’d been back in the world six months and was, unequivocally, an absolute mess. He’d been shown one or two utterly enchanting episodes before he’d been expected to interact, and had been on edge and anxious right up until Elmo, whose job it had been to talk with Steve about Accepting Everybody, had put his little fuzzy arms around Steve’s waist. 

The thing is, Steve had been twenty-six and lost. Without his husband, without his home, without anyone he’d known, he was floating in a sea of depression and grief and barely keeping his head above water, and nobody had called him by name. Cap, Captain Rogers, Sir - it hadn’t hit him until Elmo said it.

Two fuzzy little arms at his waist, one fuzzy little head against his flank.

“Elmo loves Steve.”

He’d been about five seconds from weeping like a baby. 

So now they always have Elmo come and say hello to Steve when he comes in for shooting, whether Steve’s shooting with Elmo or not, and Steve always says hello and Elmo always gives him a hug and tells him Elmo loves Steve, and Steve always tells Elmo that Steve loves Elmo too and, yeah, okay, Steve isn’t stupid. He knows Elmo is ping-pong balls and faux fur. But Elmo was the first in the twenty-first century to offer Steve something besides a title and a ton of expectations, and it was enough to move him greatly, and get him started on figuring out how to live in this century, instead of just existing in it. He used to talk to Elmo’s performer - because Elmo’s adorable but Steve knows who he really has to thank. He’s on pretty familiar terms with the guy who took over, too.

He leaves the set feeling much lighter and much happier for having seen all his favorite performers and hugged all his favorite muppets, and then it’s just a short journey home from Queens before he’s back in Manhattan. He grabs lunch on the way - sushi, because today is a day for being nice to himself - and he plans his afternoon carefully in his head on the home stretch. He has to be careful about it because, if he extrapolates too far, he absolutely will get hard on the bike. And although that’s not _too_ bad - he is, after all, going back to the tower, to park in the private underground lot, to take the private residential elevator, to go back to his tower apartment - there’s never a zero percent chance that he’ll meet someone on the way up. Most of his colleagues know why he spends so much time away from everyone when Bucky’s not around but the last thing he needs is stifled giggles and innuendos from people he’s supposed to direct during an emergency.

The plan is this - lunch, bath, ‘self-care,’ dinner, edge, sleep. 

He thinks about lunch - he’s got some saké left that he can heat, and some mochi in the refrigerator that Bucky bought him. Then he’ll take a soak (and resolutely not think about what else he’ll do) in the bath with something nice - that lavender stuff smells lovely, or- 

Or the vanilla thing. He loves vanilla (he’s said as much so many times that he hears Bucky’s ‘coulda fooled me’ response in his head whenever he even _thinks_ about vanilla these days). Maybe he’ll take something special into the bath too, he’ll think about it. 

Then the touching, which he’s not thinking about - naked on the bed with that skin cream and a whole afternoon to kill - he’s _not thinking about it!_

And then work himself up before he goes to sleep, like yesterday. Then sleep, and Bucky, and maybe he can convince Bucky to lend a hand.

He pulls into the tower with the knowledge that he’s on the edge of getting hard, so he tries to think about the mechanics of his bike or the issues surrounding a mission or what he plans to say in his conference briefing meeting whatevers tomorrow, but he makes it as far as the elevator before he’s thinking about Bucky fucking him senseless _on the bike_ , and then his brain wonders what a reach-around hand-job would feel like going a hundred on the highway, and then how good the idling engine would feel if Bucky stuffed him up with a plug and a gag and bound his upper body and sat him naked on the seat- _o-_ kay, he gets in the elevator and asks Jarvis to Express Deliver him to the floor with an emergency bypass.

“And please do not tell anyone why,” he says, though he knows Jarvis could only tell Tony, and that would only be in a legitimate emergency.

 _“Are you safe, Captain?”_ Jarvis answers, and here’s the thing about living where he lives - if Jarvis calls him by the wrong rank and Steve says ‘I’m A-Okay, Jarvis,’ then that’s a coded response to a coded interaction, and Jarvis will act like nothing’s wrong to Steve while he silently alerts any Avengers on duty, so Steve says,

“I’m fine, Jay, I just don’t want to run into anyone,” because he’s actually fine and really just doesn’t want to run into anyone.

 _“In that case, Commander, I have no idea what you’re talking about,”_ Jarvis answers, and Steve’s doors open onto his floor.

“Thanks,” Steve says, stepping out, and Jarvis answers as the doors close.

_“You are most welcome, Commander.”_

Steve all but stumbles into the apartment, shoving his hand against the front of his pants with a groan as soon as the door closes behind him, dropping his groceries because there are more important things to worry about. He doesn’t really give a fuck about it to be quite honest - that thing about the gag and the plug came out of nowhere but he can’t stop thinking about it - mouth open wide around a rubber ball, leather straps cutting into his cheeks, rope cinching his wrists and arms and chest while Bucky stands aside and watches for fun, because Steve can stand astride the bike semi-comfortably in shoes or boots but naked he’d be forced to sit with his full weight on the plug inside of him while the bike thrummed between his legs. This is Bucky’s fault, for sure, Steve thinks as he braces himself against the wall and opens his fly. Bucky’s the one who likes those videos - those ones where they take a fella and strap him down and do to him what Bucky likes to do to Steve - make him wait and wait and work and work and then _finally_ let him come so hard his brain melts. 

It’s definitely Bucky’s _fault_ Steve’s having thoughts like that, but it’s very much Steve who’s enjoying the image. 

He gets his cock in hand and squeezes tight - doesn’t move, just squeezes - and tries to breathe through the ache of wanting something, anything. No, not anything, he wants-

“Bucky,” he groans, and he does move then - just nice and slow to take the stinging edge off _want-it-now_ and he shouldn’t until tomorrow but, fuck it, he’s _definitely_ putting something in his ass today, if only to take his mind off his _dick_.

When he’s not so much in danger of digging his fingers into the drywall, he pushes back a little and eases up off his dick. He’s meant to be having lunch right about now but he can put it in the refrigerator and eat it later. Yeah, he’s gonna put it in the refrigerator and eat it later. 

He showers, instead of taking that bath, gets good and clean and nice and prepped and, because he’s a master tactician and thought ahead, he uses antibacterial wipes to clean the wall of the bathroom and slaps that rubber Johnson with the suction cup against the wall so he can fuck himself stupid, all fours on cold tile so he can be nice and loud about it. He places it a little low accidentally because he’s desperate, which is fine because all he has to do to counter it is spread his legs wider to get his ass down lower, but then he has a brainwave because his mind’s eye won’t leave him be, and puts the thing really nice and low so he can get on his back with his feet flat against the wall instead. 

That way his dick lies on his stomach like the men in Bucky’s videos, and he can pretend his legs are bent because they’re tied, and he can-

Actually, if he does this _in_ the shower, he can lie under the spray like he’s been left there to be used or left out in the rain or-

He flops against the tile for a second and just breathes.

“Bucky, I swear to God,” he mutters, because he used to be a nice guy, he really did. 

He used to care about briefings and missions and meals and schedules, and now he’s a guy who’s about to fuck himself stupid on a big rubber Johnson under shower spray because the shower spray will feel really good on his dick and his balls and where his hole will be stretched around the rubber (because everything will be exposed when he lies on his back with his legs up) but won’t be enough to get him off. What’s more, it’s therefore the perfect elaborate masturbation setup for what he’s aiming at - good enough that he can go for hours, weak enough that it won’t get him off. 

But because this particular tactician is currently operating with an orgasm-deprived, arousal-clouded brain, Steve’s halfway down the length of the thing, on his back with his eyes closed under the shower spray, when he realizes he doesn’t have his nipple clamps with him. 

“Oh, fuck _me,”_ he mutters, and gets a mouthful of warm water for his trouble. 

Nah, it’s no good - just pinching them isn’t gonna cut it. 

He pulls off, rolls out of the shower, and goes to get his nipple clamps from the bedroom. The extra minutes it takes him to really get into it is only going to work in Bucky’s favor, after all.

~

He does take the bath, when he’s warmed his dildo with his ass until all the lube has washed away and his hole is sore and red - and, yes, he does do that on purpose because partially he likes the lingering knowledge of having done it, partially it satisfies the urge to ram himself full of something. He likes cockwarming, kind of. Bucky’s human dick is a good size and Steve likes it. Bucky’s incubus dick is _much bigger_ and has spoiled Steve for literally any other dick, so it’s a good job Steve only wants the one (or…two? One human-slash-incubus pair of) dick(s) for the rest of his life. 

Bucky says there’s a website about dragons that does crazy weird rubber Johnsons but apparently none of them come close to looking like Bucky’s really, and Steve’s not surprised. Bucky’s incubus dick is glorious, beautiful, a work of art in purple and red. Ridged either side in scallops, covered with little bits of erectile tissue that puff up into wavy-but-symmetrical lines, knotted prettily at the base - he’s designed for pleasure. Literally, that’s the whole point - that’s why Bucky’s tongue has nubs on it, that’s why Bucky’s fingerprints are more defined. He’s supposed to be able to pleasure _exceptionally well_ in order to assure his own survival, and Steve can confirm that Bucky certainly does do that, thanks. Plus his incubus dick _looks_ like it’s designed for pleasure, too, which is really good when the effectiveness of your primary form of sustenance is made all the more effective by arousal. 

It looks good, it feels good, and Steve misses it a whole bunch, but dildo-warming doesn’t satisfy the itch - that’s the point - and so he takes a bath instead.

It is really, really nice to have a bath and, what’s more, he has one of those plank things that goes across so he can read if he wants. He puts his sushi on nice little plates that he bought for himself a few self-care sessions ago - little black-underneath plates with red-actual-plate part - and he puts that and a cup of saké and his mochi and his tablet computer on the wood board, and then goes to have his lunch and his bath all at once. He’s clean already, this is just for fun. 

He gets in while it’s running - the temperature’s set beforehand so he can sit in and not freeze or burn, and the water’s cycled through a system of filters once it’s in the bath, via a little opening in the tub that’s kind of near the plug hole, so it stays clean and warm for as long as he’s in and doesn’t really disturb the mountains of fluffy suds on top. He doesn’t settle back until the water’s up to where he wants, and that way the sides of the bath won’t be cold when he leans against them. 

He sighs heavily as he lets himself sink down in the water a little. He’s not cold, but warm water’s always nice. People ask him if he hates the cold because of crashing the plane, because of losing Bucky in the Alps. 

No, thanks, he hates the cold because of every winter the frost was inside the windows, every winter his lungs rattled so loud they couldn’t sleep, every winter he stood at Death’s door with Death’s hand fisted in his shirt trying to drag him through, and only his own stubbornness keeping his fingers embedded in the fucking doorframe.

Plenty of people have had it worse than him, alright? He knows. 

But right now? Right now he takes a minute to wake his skin up a little (not that it needs it), but he’s been vigorous enough with the ‘shower’ that he doesn’t much feel like doing anything to himself in particular. It’s nice, actually - being happy to just sit where he is and eat his lunch. He’ll worry about the rest afterward, when the urge to get off reasserts itself. For now the urge to lie very still and eat nice food is first and foremost, and he’s going to savor that while he can.

***

It lasts for exactly as long as it takes him to eat his lunch. Which, alright, that’s his own fault - if he hadn’t thought about being box-tied on his Harley, he wouldn’t have needed to think about being frog-tied in the shower, God, he wants to be tied down and wrecked (tied up and wrecked, suspended and wrecked, he doesn’t care which) and he knows that even doing that to himself isn’t on his schedule. His dick is well and truly _up_   
  
TM   
  
and so he sets the board and the plates and his tablet aside and drains the bath enough that his dick is out of the water but not much else. He tells himself that he does it because the cold air might tamp down the _fuck me daddy_ urgings of his hindbrain (who is daddy in this scenario - is it himself? Is it Bucky? Who knows at this point) but really he does it so he can look at his dick and be aroused by the knowledge that he’s a) turned on, b) turned on for Bucky, and c) allowed to be turned on for Bucky.

His dick is currently being a Good Boy and Steve isn’t being a Bad Man for thinking so (and boy didn’t that take long enough). 

He stares at where his dick protrudes from the warm water, surrounded by little suds. It’s evidently having as nice a pamper-session as he is, mostly pale but darker at the tip and nice and shiny with bathwater, and he’s got to be careful - the reason his schedule looks like it does is so he doesn’t have a wet dream before Bucky can get back and feed. If he does any more of the stuff he’s already indulged in this afternoon, he’s in danger of literally blowing it. 

He takes a deep breath in through his nose and sighs heavily. 

Today he’s supposed to be loving himself in Bucky’s absence, which has always been harder than he’d like to admit, but he’ll do his best - he always does. What’s more, Bucky says he’s improving at it, apparently, and there’s a lot he’ll do for praise from Bucky. They’ve both been through a lot, and Steve’s no stranger to Praise Kink. He didn’t know that’s what it was called, and he would have denied it until he was blue in the face at one point, but there was a learning curve about it, helped enormously by the fact that Bucky knows more about the modern world than Steve’s pretty sure he ever will himself.

When he first got out of the ice, people used to ask him shit - who did he like to date, what did he like in bed - and he’d answer for two simple reasons; one, when he was younger if somebody more knowledgeable asked you shit, you answered and, two, if somebody sprung something so rude on him that it was a shock, he’d usually be shocked into an answer. That’s how Nat found out he was bisexual, how Tony found out that Steve had discovered certain corners of the internet reserved for those over eighteen, and how poor old Bruce learned just what kind of terrible digestive issues Steve had suffered before the serum. Steve was never going to live that down. 

But the thing was, he’d been inundated with new terms for old shit, or new terms for new shit. Things he shouldn’t say and things he should say and things you kept ‘on the DL’ and Things-With-Capitals - he found himself called a _Hero with a capital ‘H,’_ asked if he was _Queer with a capital ‘Q,’_ interviewed about being _Christian with a capital ‘C,’ _and wound up mentally _Fraying-Under-Constant-Knowledge-Every-Day with a capital (read that back, you’ll get it)_ \- but he learned slowly that the people who pry don’t deserve answers, and that therefore? __

____

____

He don’t owe nobody nothin’. 

_“Let ‘em ask, doll,”_ Bucky’d tell him, running gentle fingers down the middle of his chest while he lay in the bed pit, exhausted, frowning at the ceiling as he tried not to think about journalists who wanted to know his sexual preferences. _“Or give ‘em hell for askin’, where’s all that righteous indignation, baby, huh?”_

And, though the answer was ‘it fell off a train about eighty years ago’ - because, even having Bucky back, Steve had never quite been the same - he also knew Bucky had a point. 

So he started telling them where to get off - politely but in no uncertain terms - and the questions dried up for the most part eventually. 

But Steve also learned - and here’s the important part - that even though nobody else needed to know a damn thing about him, he could tell Bucky anything. Anything he wanted, he could give that knowledge to Bucky and know it’d be kept safe. So where it had been hard for Steve, once, to say, things like _'Buck, I…I want you,’_ on a hot, dusty summer evening in Brooklyn after he’d had a little too much to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, and where it had been difficult to say, _‘Bucky you know what you mean to me’_ in the dark by a campfire in Europe, and where it wasn’t as simple as he would have liked to say, _‘I missed you so much, Bucky,’_ when Bucky first showed up on his doorstep, time made it easier to say ‘I love you more every day, Buck,’ regardless of who was listening. 

And it wasn’t limited to pesky emotions, either. No longer was Steve afraid to ask if Bucky _liked that_ , to ask Bucky how he’d done, to tell Bucky what he wanted. So yeah, Steve might have a pretty heavy Praise Kink, but he knows that if he says to Bucky ‘how’s the self-love taste?’ then, at the very least, Bucky will tell him ‘you get better at it every time.’

Because Steve is _trying._

And Bucky’s proud of Steve, whether he’s telling Bucky he loves him or asking Bucky to DP him with his dick and his tail. Steve has learned to ask for what he wants, and say what he thinks, and right now he’s doing his best to love himself the way Bucky wants him to. 

"I am a valid person,” he tells his dick. “You are a valid dick.” 

His dick doesn’t answer.

“I deserve my husband,” he says, and shuts his eyes, tips his head back. “That doesn’t feel right.” He does Bucky’s voice. “ ‘Yeah, well, that doesn’t _sound_ right.’ Yeah well, you’re not naked in a bathtub in-” 

He cuts himself off, he’s going to get maudlin. 

“I am a valid person with a valid dick and I deser-” nope. “I _love_ my stupid incubus husband, I love my incubus husband, I love my incubus husband. I deserve-” He runs his hand over his eyes. “Bucky,” he sing-songs, “I haaate yoooou.”

But he doesn’t. 

“I don’t,” he says, dropping his hand as a chill passes over his shoulders, probably his mother’s spirit berating him for saying that. “I don’t, I don’t hate you, Buck, I love you a lot, love you more’n anything.” And then he sighs and looks at the ceiling. “I love my stupid incubus husband and his stupid words because he means well and he wants me to love me like he loves me, which is a lot. I love my husband who thinks I deserve him, because he thinks I deserve him. I did not work hard for my body and I work hard _in_ my body.” 

He hates these. There’s a whole list and he hates all of them. He doesn’t hate _them,_ he hates trying to say them and having to think about the implications of them. He doesn’t believe them, is the problem, except the one about working hard in his body. He _didn’t_ work hard for his body but he does frequently work hard _in_ his body and, while he doesn’t think the latter means he deserves the former, he knows that they’re both facts. He didn’t work for his body - fact. He does work hard in his body - fact. 

“I am a good- I try to be a good person.” 

He can hear Bucky’s voice saying them, but hearing Bucky’s voice isn’t the point. 

Bucky says, 

_“You’re a valid person whose wants and needs are valid, you deserve your incubus husband, you did not work hard for your body but you work hard_ in _your body, because you are a good man who is too hard on himself. Repeat after me.”_

"I am a valid person whose wants and needs are valid,” Steve says, with his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the lip of the tub. “I-” nope “-love my incubus husband more than anything and I did not work hard for my body. I work hard in my body and I try to be a good man.” 

It’ll have to do for now. 

It’s also really easy to say them if he says them from his own point of view. If he precedes every statement with ‘Bucky thinks,’ then there’s no tightness in his chest, no unease in his stomach. ‘Bucky thinks I deserve my incubus husband’ is a lot better than nothing at all. 

It’s not good enough, though, that’s what he hates about it. He knows what Bucky wants and he can’t provide it. He also knows Bucky won’t be upset, or angry, or anything else but… 

He sighs. 

It would be nice if he could do it, just because it would be nice for Bucky but this is a spiral he’s been in before, and he has to stop it now because, the more he worries about it, the more it’ll affect what he tastes like later. Bucky’s better at the whole thing by nature but he’s better at a lot by nature anyway. Bucky thrives wherever he goes but Steve thrives most with Bucky. 

"Bucky’s coming back,” Steve says, “he’ll be back in two days." 

He looks at his dick, which has started to soften a little. 

“Okay, no,” he says, and points at it. “You and me, we got things to do." 

And then he sits up in the bath and looks around. 

The bottle of that vanilla stuff is on the side, near the windowsill, and he knows that you get a kind of slime if you don’t work shit up into a lather - two birds with one stone as far as he’s concerned, because he’s clean, but he’s not _washed_ clean. He’s showered, but he hasn’t lathered up since he got in the bath and there’s part of his subconscious that twitches if he’s in a clean body of water without washing - his mother’s influence, he’s sure. That’s the second time he’s thought about her in a bath meant for preparation for his husband, he’d like to keep his mind on track, thanks. 

He grabs the vanilla stuff, vanilla sugar or something, from a bath-something shop, but he doesn’t know if it’s Bath & Body Works or Body Bed and Beyond Bath Whatever, and he doesn’t much care, either. He gets a good sized amount in his palm and then puts the bottle back, and then he settles back against the end of the tub and closes his eyes. 

It isn’t difficult to picture Bucky in the room with him - they do everything together. Partially it’s the incubus bond (Incubond, if Steve really wants to annoy) and partially it’s the ridiculous sort-of-codependency they both have, which was made worse for both of them by the serum. They’re both aware of it, and they do their best to live their lives without having it drag them down but, honestly, the only part they really perpetuate is the ‘reliance on other people for approval and a sense of identity’ - they’re both in therapy, each as a demand from the other, and they have tried to create their own social circles outside of each other. Steve has the Avengers, Bucky has his VA people. They each know each others’ friends but, for the most part, it’s clear who’d get whom in a hypothetical divorce. 

Steve opens his eyes and laughs by himself in their bathroom. Ah, haha, divorce. There’s _one_ thing he never has to worry about, at least. 

But the thing is, it’s difficult when the only person who remembers your childhood, who remembers your mother, who remembers your pals, who followed you across seven decades and will love you forever, is this one dude you love more than anything. Like, screw codependency, honestly - people who call what they are _a problem_ are people who cannot comprehend.

Sure it was a problem at first - at first Steve didn’t want to let Bucky out of his sight, they were together every night when he slept, they spent months sleeping and eating and fucking and hiding away from everyone in the bed pit and only stopped to shower if it was part of the sex-marathon, but Steve thinks they were entitled to it. They don’t do it often now, and definitely only really out of necessity. It’s not like they can’t function apart, just that they function better together. There’s a difference between codependency and synchronicity, and Steve likes to think they do a pretty good job of being the latter considering everything they’ve been through.

By the time he’s been through all this in his head, the vanilla sugar body-wash is warm in his palm, and he tries to think about Bucky, instead of about how much he doesn’t like himself or how dumb the rest of the world is when it comes to understanding the two of them. He closes his eyes again and breathes deeply through his nose a couple of times. If Bucky were here, and Steve pictures him curled up like a gargoyle on the lid of the toilet because he likes to do that sometimes, he’d be naked - because Bucky very much likes being naked and Steve very much likes him naked too - and he’d be watching intently with his pretty eyes. If Steve could convince him to be Big, he’d be black-eyed and sharp-toothed, and tragelaphini-horned, crouching like a seal-point with his spectacular shades of purple gray. Steve loves it, the pigment stretches from Bucky’s toes and fingers to his hips and shoulders, like long gloves or huge boots, his genitals a soft indigo-leaning purple that’s a shade Steve’s never been able to get right on canvas. 

Bucky’s horns are as black as his eyes, are as black as his hooves - though he doesn’t often keep his hooves in the house. He likes his feet to match his hands, and so he makes black toenails and long, black fingernails. Hooves and claws may not be conducive to gentle, loving sex-without-injury, but Bucky can give himself toenails and long-fingernails by appearance without pulling the matter in from his dimension. Which means he can look like he could claw Steve’s eyes out while still being able to safely finger him.

“Ugh, please,” Steve says quietly into the humid air of the bathroom, and passes his palm up his torso from his abs to his chest, spreading the soap slime stuff over his skin. 

Maybe he could ask Bucky to do that, it might be one of the only things they’ve never tried. Still, as far as getting fingered in the bath goes, it might be much nicer to manipulate the dreamscape for it instead, put them in a crystal clear blue lagoon and have Bucky work him open slowly. 

He hears the soft sound sound of the water shifting in the bath as the thought that makes his ass clench moves his dick in the water, too, and runs bath-gel-slick fingers over his pecs, too, avoiding his nipples for the time being - this is supposed to be about self-awareness, about experiencing his body instead of his body experiencing things. Still, it’s difficult not to think of a lush rainforest and clear water and seclusion - especially when it involves sex and _especially_ when that sex runs no actual physical risks. It’s not like he can get a UTI from rainforest bacteria if they’re not actually in a rainforest pool, he can’t get bitten by malarial mosquitoes if there aren’t even any in the dreamscape. 

He’s not sure that even the serum could help him recover from Big Bucky’s actual whole fist, but he’s taken it once or twice in the dreamscape (and wound up a happily drooling mess therin). 

Bucky’s prosthetic grows when he does, of course - that’s part of the magic of _magic_ , and part of the terribly human part of being human. Whatever they did to him, the arm is as permanent as the incubus, but Steve loves all of him, whether he’s purple and gray and pale and huge, or Bucky Barnes the Human. 

Steve wants the scratch of nails over his nipples, wants the threat of teeth near his dick, but he can settle for a self-massage in Bucky’s absence. 

Bucky, now Bucky likes to touch him. Bucky always did, mind, but moreso now. It’s like, now that Steve has more skin by virtue of being bigger, Bucky wants to make sure that none of it goes untouched. He likes to start behind Steve’s ears with gentle fingertips, so Steve does that too. Bucky will spend a little time on his earlobes, too, on caressing the shell and rubbing the back of them. When Steve was younger, before the serum, Bucky used to focus on all the bits of him that _weren’t_ his dick because his dick so often refused to cooperate. Steve has always liked having his ears rubbed, having his neck kissed, having his nipples sucked - but he liked those things a whole lot more once Bucky started doing them for him. 

After his ears, he rubs his palms over his neck, tilting his head to one side as though making room for Bucky to kiss his throat. Bucky would, soft and smiling, and Steve lets his fingers follow the same path Bucky takes - meandering downward, out across his collar bones. Steve broke the right one most recently so, as of when it healed six months ago, Bucky pays a little more attention to that one, even though the serum means it might as well have never happened at all. 

What Steve wants, at this juncture, is to play with his pecs and then jerk off - it’s what he’d do if Bucky were here. But what _Bucky_ would do would be touch Steve all over until Steve couldn’t handle any more of it. He’s hoping that Bucky _will_ \- slow, careful intimacy is one of his favorite forms of intimacy - but right now he isn’t meant to be focusing on that. 

He sets the heel of his palm between his pecs and then sweeps it outward one way, cupping the muscle in his hand and letting the creases of his finger pass over his nipple because he’s only human and it feels really good. When he brings his palm around again, he’s thinking of how to go over the rest of his skin, but winds up going right back up his throat to his ear again. 

It’s nice, actually - obviously it’s nice, that’s why he’s doing it - but it’s…

He sighs softly, goes over the skin once or twice until it starts to sensitize. It doesn’t take long if he concentrates - while he used to be frustratingly immune to a whole slew of different touches, these days the serum means he can clock the air from the AC if he tries hard enough. He might do it later - lie naked in the bed pit, set out some of the silks and faux furs, and try to wake his skin without touching.

All his plans for today are getting derailed.

He lifts his other hand and strokes his palms from the back of his neck, down his throat, over his pecs without stopping and then past his stomach to the outsides of his thighs. It gets his hands wet and the lotiony feeling turns slick as he brings his hands back onto the insides of his thighs.

He doesn’t touch his dick, as much as he wants to, and settles his thumbs in the creases where his thighs meet his torso instead, rubbing the soft skin there with the pads for a few moments until the urge to grab his dick makes his palms itch. He rubs his palms over the tops of his thighs this time - back and forth, back and forth - and then groans softly as he winces. 

He really shouldn’t have fucked himself in the shower because he really is finding it difficult to concentrate on anything that isn’t his dick.

It’s been out of the water for long enough that it’s starting to dry in places along the shaft, though his balls are still underwater and the head is still slick with precome. It makes the skin feel tighter there and he flexes his hips just a little to ease the ache before he decides he can’t keep his hands off if they’re that close. His solution doesn’t work either, not really - he strokes his hands in winding lines over his flanks and his stomach, tries to think about his skin and how his body lies and how the room is warm and the water is warm, but what actually happens is that he settles his hands on his abs and cups his pecs in the gap between his thumb and index fingers, and starts thumbing his nipples instead. 

“Uhn,” he says softly, because Bucky likes his little noises, and he keeps his eyes shut and arches his back just a little. 

He likes this body objectively, but doesn’t always like to think about himself in it, which is why Bucky encourages him to do this. Bucky loves the body _because_ Steve’s in it. 

He tips his head back against the tub and passes his hands over his skin to pick up a little of the soap that’s starting to turn sticky on it, and tries to focus on making his touches light, tries to focus on how it feels. 

He joins his one hand with his second soon enough, passes his knuckles over his nipples and back, tries gathering his fingers together over them in not-quite a pinch but, like everyone else, he knows what he likes for himself and doesn’t stray too much from it. He shouldn’t be lying back in barely any water and thumbing his nipples with soap slick fingers, but it feels so good to do it. He has to be careful because he _is_ capable of coming from just that these days but, right now, it’s enough to just lie there and enjoy it. Bucky likes to scrape his teeth over Steve’s pecs, likes to suck and nip at Steve’s skin, likes to roll his tongue over Steve’s nipples and make him squirm just because he can, and Steve rocks his hips just to feel the ripples in the water come back and lap at his skin. 

Bucky likes to do that, too.

~

His nipples grow sore eventually, because they always do if he plays with them long enough when he’s not really feeling it. He _was_ feeling it, and was reasonably happy to keep going for a while, but his mind kept wandering. 

It’s not his fault, really it’s not - Bucky told him about post-orgasm-clarity but Bucky’s not sure on the science between how fuzzy Steve’s brain gets before orgasm, especially if he’s spending two or three days stocking up on that before-orgasm feeling.

The problem is that Steve started thinking about what Bucky would do, and then how big Bucky can get, and he doesn’t really want a physical injury from Bucky but Bucky can do _anything_ to him in the dreamscape. 

Anything.

They do try and limit it, of course. If very night was marathon sex night, Steve would never have any energy and his dreams would never do what they’re meant to do - dreams are there for a reason. They’re like the laundromat of your day. Day goes in, dreams come out, tomorrow’s all fresh and clean to start again. 

Besides which, if they had kinky adventurous sex all the time, Steve’s worried that he’d somehow get used to it.

So far they have favorites, sure, and there’s a list of little fantasies that Steve comes up with and keeps to himself until there’s a special occasions, but they haven’t ever run out of ideas. Sometimes they follow through into the real world, although not where it would be obvious. Yes, nobody’s going to be watching Steve get railed on the hood of his car overlooking the Grand Canyon but sometimes it’s nice to be out and about and know that, when they come back, grinding on the couch or a nice, slow fuck in the bed pit can be just as satisfying. 

His ass still hurts from the dildo, though, and he immediately flashes back to the last time they had a go at cockwarming - that wasn’t in the dreamscape. Steve had to kneel there in the bed pit, facing Bucky’s feet, stuffed full of Bucky’s pretty pleasure-wringing dick, and eat what Bucky fed him. Bucky was even doing it one-handed - the other one was busy holding Steve’s hands behind his back.

He could do with a little more of that, actually, remembers how shivery it made him, how his whole body trembled with exertion and desire, how every touch had felt like a brand.

He gets out of the bath when it doesn’t feel like a luxury to be there any longer, and then he finds the moisturizer Bucky bought him. It’s not like he needs it, of course, but the smell alone is enough to get him hard these days - honey or something, and something that’s a little like cedar. Steve’s never found anything else that smells like it but Bucky apparently has an endless supply, and he’ll put it on his hands in a briefing if he’s trying to make Steve’s life difficult, rub a little into Steve’s shoulders just to see how long Steve can resist.

He takes the cap off the bottle and smells it, and feels the rush of blood that signals arousal. 

It’s not like he can make it any worse by doing this, not when the end result is still the same. 

He puts a sheet down in the bed pit, so that when he gets the body butter stuff all over him, it only goes on him and the sheet, and not all the amazing different-textures of fabrics and pillows they have strewn around. He pauses a moment as he does, thinking carefully about his decision. If he gets covered in moisturizer, he won’t be able to rub himself all over the velvet and faux fur pillows…but the lotion wins out eventually, because he’s still wet from the bath so he’d have to spend more time air-drying if he decided on the cushions and whatnot. Plus, they’ll still be there later, when he’s done with dinner and up to date with his paperwork, when it’s time for his last edging session before he sleeps. 

***

Bucky isn’t with him in the dreamscape that night, presumably busy with the mission, and so Steve dreams a tangled web of darkness and disorientation that ends with him drowning under a too-cold waterfall because he can’t come up for air (because nobody’s reaching down into the water to pull him up).

When he comes awake at four-thirty, he doesn’t try going back to sleep.

~

He spars with Thor, because Thor resolutely doesn’t give a fuck if Steve gets hard when they’re sparring. Neither does Natasha, but she’s out with Sam and Bucky. Actually, Clint has also never been fazed by it, but he’s not in the tower - he’s busy sorting out an issue one of his tenants is dealing with, by which he probably means he’s making sure he solves someone’s problem, and that person will become a tenant. 

Steve doesn’t let Thor beat him, because that’s not how they work. It’s like Natasha never lets Steve beat her - he can, he does sometimes, but usually it’s because it’s been a bad day and, just sometimes, it’s because of necessity - training isn’t worth jack unless you’re giving it your all. When they first started sparring together, Steve used to lose frequently, because he was fresh out of the ice and his techniques were seventy years out of date. He learned, he adapted, often they spar to get rid of energy and sometimes they train to work together in the field (he can throw her across the gym, so why not throw her across a battlefield?), but if they’re going one-on-one, if they’re both fighting hard to find a winner, Steve almost always wins. 

He doesn’t like it, actually. It frightens him to know that there are forces out there that can turn them against each other and that, if someone does that to him, he’s a danger to his friends. 

That’s why it’s so great they’ve got Thor around.

Steve hits the mat with a grunt, which is not bad considering he was kicked back twenty feet and landed back-first, and bounces over onto his stomach. He’s got on his toes and fingertips by then, though, and runs back, charges, before he lunges forward into a handspring. That way, when he leaves the ground, it’s to bring his legs up around Thor’s neck like Natasha taught him. If you asked, he’d tell you he’s using his own momentum to swing around using Thor’s neck as a pivot, so that he keeps going but Thor goes forward onto his knees. But basically, he does a bunch of flips and uses his thighs to chuck Thor in the opposite direction - for all that Thor’s stronger than him (oh and he is, by far), he doesn’t usually expect Steve to follow-through like a Widow. Steve lands on his hands and handsprings again so he flips back onto his feet just in time to find that Thor’s…probably gone straight into a roll, Steve was too busy flipping onto his hands to see, and come up on his feet again so they’re both standing. 

Steve turns around to look at him.

Outside of Bucky, Thor is the only one who can fight long enough by himself to get Steve out of breath. Everyone else is a challenge, yes, but they have to take him on in twos or threes to get him to expend nearly as much energy. 

“Ready?” Thor asks, because he always does. 

“Oyah,” Steve pants, and plants his feet. “Wha’we doin’?”

Thor shrugs one shoulder. 

“You’re running off the extra, are you not?” he says, and gestures at Steve’s dick. 

It isn’t hard but it isn’t soft either. 

Steve shrugs one shoulder too.

“Yah,” he says, and swipes the back of his hand over his eyes, not that it does much for the sweat in them. 

“Alright then,” Thor says, and nods. “Best of seventeen.”

Steve huffs a laugh and nods. 

“Jarvis?” 

_“On your marks,”_ Jarvis says, and Thor lunges, tackles Steve around the middle and slams him backward and down onto the mat. 

“Huagh!” Steve says when he hits, but he’s not ready to be done - Thor does this often, citing enemies who don’t play by the rules of combat, and Steve’s learned just how hard to swing his elbow to hit Thor’s nose hard enough to knock him off.

Thor’s aim is to roll away but Steve cinches his legs tight around Thor’s waist as he does and comes up on top of him, astride him. Thor snorts, and just lifts him bodily, shoving Steve over his head. Steve lands in a heap and laughs, turning onto his back.

“Who won that one?” he says, and Thor tilts his head back to look at him.

“You hit the mat first,” he said. “I’m the one bleeding. Jarvis?”

 _“A tie, in that case,”_ Jarvis answers, _“unless Commander Rogers would like to be docked a point for striking after the end of a round?”_

Steve waves a hand and pulls himself up onto his feet.

“Eh,” he says. “Dealer’s choice.”

Thor cocks his head.

“Dealer?” he asks, and Steve nods.

“Yeah, that rotten hand you just gave me,” he says, flashing a grin.

Thor’s teeth are bloody when he returns it. 

“Ready?” he says. 

Thor wins, because of course he does, but they keep going all the way up to seventeen to see how many Steve can get. 

Three, as it turns out - once he ducks between Thor’s legs in a slide and kicks upward from behind, sending Thor onto his stomach on the mat, once he dodges twice and gets a good punch in on Thor’s face before swinging his body upward to use his own momentum to slam Thor backward onto the mat, and once when they’re being particularly flirty between rounds, face to face, and Steve gets one of Thor’s thighs between his own - which means one of his is between Thor’s, which means one of his feet is between Thor’s, which means he can kick Thor’s foot out from under him. 

“Ahh, cheating,” Thor says as he takes Steve’s hand so Steve can pull him back onto his feet. 

“Using an advantage,” he answers, and Thor fists his hand in the front of Steve’s shirt as soon as they’re level, and drags him forward for a kiss. 

It’s one of those Asgardian things is what it is - blood and teeth like a challenge, instead of lips and tongue like a lover.

“Alright,” Thor tells him. “Best of twenty-one.”

~

He calls off his briefing at nine, with an hour and a half to spare so that nobody comes in to find they weren’t needed - instead he should catch everyone before they leave their homes. 

He spends the time with Thor instead, and he is aching by lunchtime, though his bruises will have faded by dinner. There was the obligatory pin-me-to-the-floor a couple of times, and the oft-used-in-private _grind_ or two, but Thor’s as aware as any of them that Steve has a schedule and he needs to stick to it. It’s _terribly_ unfair that physical exertion equals adrenaline, and adrenaline equals arousal more often than not, but it’s also kind of exactly what Steve expected, and exactly what he needed. It was hard to shake off the nightmares, and it’s always difficult to shake off the worry - Bucky’s fine. Bucky exists on at least two separate planes for a majority of the time, so if something takes Bucky down then that will be the least of Planet Earth’s problems. But Steve Rogers is just one guy and, regardless of how immensely large the presence of James Barnes The Flesh Consumer (demon name - don’t ask) is, Bucky’s one guy too. And that one guy happens to be the literal other half of Steve’s soul.

Thor takes him to the communal floor and cooks him something Asgardian that’s basically a full table of food, by way of apology.

“Because I beat you,” he says, “as is my responsibility.”

Steve grins around a mouthful of…uh, meat. And nods.

“Yeah, you’re damn right I am,” he says - something something Asgardian tradition et cetera dictates that brothers in arms who spar together should maintain the strength of their comradeship through food or something, as in, Thor kicked Steve’s ass, so here’s a giant lunch to prove it’s all in good fun. 

It makes sense, Steve thinks. If the _loser_ had to make food, that would just be salt in the wound. But this way? This way the victor humbles themselves, and helps the recuperation of the, y’know, loser. Which Steve is technically. 

“When is he home?” Thor asks, sitting down to eat finally, now that everything’s prepared and Steve’s a good portion of the way through it. 

“Tomorrow,” Steve answers once he’s swallowed his mouthful. “And I cannot _wait._ ”

Thor smiles, nods a little. 

“Have you plans?”

“Oh the usual,” Steve answers. “Not see anyone for a few days and then act like we’re a normal couple. What about you, what’s your week look like?”

Thor laughs, a deep, warm sound that’s always said _with you_ to Steve instead of _at you,_ and Thor talks about the article (photoshoot) GQ want him for and the training program at the compound, and the couple of visits he wants to make to a few stops on the way to Asgard. Steve just listens to him, and eats, and enjoys the fact that he’s got friends who care about him enough to goad him when he needs it, and enough to comfort when he needs that too. He’s luckier than anything, this he knows, to have landed on his feet like he has. He still has Bucky, he has a place to live and friends who care for him, and he’s learned a better way of life in this future than he ever thought possible in his past. 

He misses the people he’s lost, of course he does. But, warm bread and salty meat on his platter, a morning of exertion behind him and the warmth of a friendship before him, Steve is happy, and that’s all he could ask for - more than he ever dared dream.

***

After lunch, he naps. The more he sleeps, the closer it will be to Bucky coming home, and the more likely the chance of him seeing Bucky. If Bucky’s taking a nap, they might meet in the overlap.

It’s not to be, though - Steve dreams about ravioli and tortellini and feeling too full, and wakes up fuzzy-headed and face-down with his ear hurting. It doesn’t take him long to figure out he shifted in his sleep and folded it in half to lie on it, so he sits up, trying to massage the blood back into it with one hand, and stretches. He went to sleep in his clothes but tugs his shirt over his head and throws it, shucks his pants and his underwear too. The rest of today is psychological self-torture. Psychological masochism? Whatever - this afternoon is for methodically cleaning and preparing all their sex toys, and he likes to do it naked to make it particularly difficult on himself. The only thing less easy than cleaning his sex toys properly is doing so knowing full-well he’s not going to get to use them today.

He shouldn’t have used the dildo in the shower yesterday, not really - he’s lucky he didn’t have a wet dream. He kind of likes them, of course, but only if Bucky’s there. Sometimes Bucky’s the one causing them, sure - they’re sharing a mind on another plane of existence, and Steve’s body reacts to the pleasure on this plane it’s receiving on another - but sometimes he just has them, and wakes up slowly, body sated and loose. Then, either Bucky’s already awake and enjoying the echoes of the aftermath consciously, or he wakes slowly, too.

Ideally, then, they spend the say in bed making love, even though it’s unlikely that they have enough time off to do so in reality.

Sometimes, though.

Steve gets up and stretches again, feeling just a little on the cool side as he does, but that’s fine. It’ll keep his senses sharp and make everything a little more difficult. Bucky had better be goddamn pleased-

Bucky will be, he always is. 

But still. 

He decides, as he almost always does, that he’ll clean his favorites. There’s no need to clean _everything_ given that not everything has been used since the last time, but he does have particular ones he likes, and he will clean all of them whether they need it or not. 

He pulls out one of the drawers from the dresser and just carries the whole thing through to the kitchen. They’ve got body-safe soap and disinfectant and whatnot, and you get much less fluff on your sex-toys if you use a dishtowel to dry them. Then he’ll set them all out on the table and leave them be, so that he catches sight of them every time he’s doing something - they won’t get dusty overnight, not with the tower’s air filtration system, and he’ll be particularly insatiable by tomorrow if he has to see what he’s being denied every two minutes. 

He sets them out on a towel on the counter-top, in no particular order, and makes sure the cleaning products are close at hand. He has the thought that he could fill the sink so full he could just hop up on the counter and dunk his junk in it, because why not, it’s their sink, and it cracks him up for a minute. He has to hold onto the edge of the counter-top and giggle for a minute. He didn’t used to think of these things. He used to be a lovely polite, demure young man.

Okay, no, that’s bullshit. But he didn’t used to think of weird sex stuff. 

Like thinking about trying to swim lengths while wearing a vibrating buttplug, or wondering how long he has to hump the fly of his very-tight jeans before he comes. He’s thinking about getting a nipple piercing.

_Anyway._

The first thing he picks up is the adjustable cock-ring, because of course it is, and so he thinks about the adjustable cock-ring while he washes it - about holding his knees while Bucky pushes the bead up to tighten it around his cock and balls, about the trailing ends brushing over his hole while he fights to stay still as Bucky looks at him. He’d be shaved - Bucky could do it. Make him stay still on all fours while he shaved Steve’s asshole, the underneath of his balls. Steve would have to lie on his back like a stranded turtle for Bucky to do the rest, and then Bucky would probably leave all the hair on the rest of his ass and thighs, just so that he’d feel ridiculously exposed. Like the opposite of underwear. 

Assless chaps, he thinks, but shaved out of his body hair the way some people do a landing strip when they get a Brazilian wax, or Christmas trees and hearts at Christmas and Valentine’s. Maybe he could get…

What’s the male version of vajazzling? 

Pedazzle?

He makes sure it’s clean inside the bead as well - it’s kind of like a can-opener, in that it’s a really useful item to have but a bitch to sanitize - and lays it out on the dishtowel to start drying, setting it out with the loop nice and big so it would fit over everything without too much trouble if Bucky came home early and decided to sneak up on Steve while he was asleep. 

Next he’s got his nipple clamps. He only has one set in the nightstand because he only likes the peg kind, mostly. They’ve got a nice little set of ones that have four screws that all tighten in towards the middle, but that’s more for show than effect - they take a while to put on given that you have to hold them in place and adjust each screw individually, and it’s not worth the effort, or the mood-kill in the heat of the moment. They tried some that look like two sticks held together at the top and bottom, but all that did was get in the way and not pinch enough for Steve, and then there was one set that was like a pair of tweezers. They were ridiculous. Steve was apparently supposed to hold his nipple in the tips and then slide a ring up the shaft to keep the two sides together. They did not work for Steve _at all_ , the ring refusing to go up high enough to cinch the sides without pinching part of his skin enough to raise a spectacularly un-fun blood blister that rubbed under the suit, and for what? If Bucky wanted to hang weights off nipple clamps, he could just put a ring on the peg-ones Steve likes. 

The clover clamps were right out - they’d put them in the wrong place the first time, and then in the right place the second time, and Steve’s thought both times had been _ow OW!_ instead of like _ooh ouch ;)_ or whatever.

They don’t take long to clean, the nipple clamps. He’s got another set somewhere that connect to a cock ring and that’s quite fun sometimes - there they are, in the bottom of the box, he’ll get to them. These ones are individual though, with little rings on the end, so Bucky can attach weights, or a rope, or a chain, or just hook his claws through them and tug while Steve’s on his knees with his hands behind his back, vibrator chugging away inside of him and his dick so hard it’s drooling precome down the length of itself.

He scrapes his teeth over his lower lip and touches his palm to the underneath of his cock, which is currently upright, and just presses it against his stomach for a second. Then he goes back to washing the clamps. His skin’s too sensitive to use them without their little vinyl sleeves, but he knows how to clean things properly, and so he removes the little vinyl sleeves and does them separately before drying the insides with a q-tip.

Next is his asslock. It’s not a lock, really. That would be difficult to achieve with something made of very flexible silicone. It’s not even one of those pear things - this just pretends it can stop him getting what he wants, even though he’s in full control of it. It’s a simple ring of silicone, attached to a strip of silicone to go between his legs, which is attached to a silicone plug that has a vibrator in it, and sometimes he likes to put it on and pretend Bucky’s left him like that, or maybe that it needs a key and Bucky’s the only one who has one. 

He takes the little bullet vibrator out of it and gives that a once-over with an antibacterial wipe, and then he cleans the silicone from ring to plug. 

He…

He could wear it. 

But if he wears it it’s going to make his life difficult, more difficult than would be helpful. It would be a great idea to try it if Bucky were right here, ready to feed, but given that Steve needs to be busy doing shit today to keep his mind off the fact that he really, _really_ wants to come, wearing something that will have him on his knees shaking with the effort to hold back within about five minutes is, eh, not so conducive to his afternoon plans. 

He sets it aside and picks up the little bullet vibe he likes to press into the slit of his dick. It’s also the same little bullet vibe0 _Bucky_ likes to press into the slit of his dick when he’s kneeling between Steve’s legs and pinning Steve’s thighs with his knees, and holding both Steve’s supersoldier hands over his head with one of his own. 

Steve sighs. 

Maybe riding the dildo yesterday pushed things too far, or maybe it was sparring with Thor this morning but, whatever it was, he’s seriously doubting his ability to wait until tomorrow.

There is a bag of peas in the freezer. He really, _really_ doesn’t want to use it. 

Steve misses a lot about Bucky. 

He misses Bucky’s laugh, Bucky’s smile, Bucky’s sense of humor. He misses the warmth of Bucky by his side, the shared jokes, the sparkle in his eyes. He misses Bucky’s voice, Bucky’s hands, the closeness they share and the love that never fades between them but hot _damn_ does he ever miss that dick.

The breadth that makes it feel like his lungs aren’t big enough, the length that turns his stomach to butterflies, the ridges and nubs that make it feel like he’s lying in a rickety bed near the tracks in the 30s while the train thunders past, only _inside_ his body. Lying on his back in the bed pit with his calves slung over Bucky’s shoulders, body fucked out and useless while Bucky drives into him over and over, pleasure scraping up the insides of his veins and screaming out of every pore-

 _“Damn,”_ he mutters, pressing his dick against his stomach again, leaning heavily on the counter for support. 

Bucky might pull out and look down at Steve, splayed out and flushed all the way down with his hole wet and red and gaping just lying there drooling, too far gone to care. Steve finds it hard to look in the mirror some days. Other days it’s easier. On days like that, Bucky likes to pull him into the dreamscape and show him what he looks like when he’s getting fucked to within an inch of his life. It’s pretty hot. 

He washes and dries all of the toys, without jerking off, without testing any of them, and without getting too far down any one particular fantasy rabbit-hole. 

He is going to have to be _very_ careful tonight. He hopes Bucky will be around in the dreamscape to deter him from ruining everything at the last minute.

~

Dinner is a casual affair, aside from the fact that he has to get dressed. Steve has been on his feet all afternoon and trying not to want to do things, and his energy begins to boil down to a simmer around about the time he realizes he has to provide for himself if he wants to eat. It turns out eating double portions of things you’ve pre-made doesn’t really help your meal plans in the long-term, and he is not in the mood to put anything on the stove or in the microwave or whatever. 

He orders pizza, because this is New York and some very well-known pizzerias make exceptions for the ‘people in the tower in Manhattan’ who happen to be stellar at saving New York and, thus, their businesses. And it helps that the Avengers happen to be led by a very well-known Brooklynite. (Is Steve saying pizzas are better in Brooklyn? Yes. Will he ever admit it out loud? It depends who asks.)

Pizza arrives - by which Steve means the pizzas arrive - at about seven-thirty, which is…Well, it’s just about right, but Steve’s going to have to make some other stuff too if he wants to live through tomorrow. Athletes carb-load for a reason, and supersoldiers with incubus husbands do too. Still, he leaves one pie with Eddie on security, who very kindly brings the stack up to their door even though Steve always begs Eddie to let him know when they arrive down in the lobby (but that’s why Steve always orders an extra pie), and then he sets it all out on the table to get a good look.

Vegetable, meat feast, white, barbecue, Hawaiian, plus a side of fries, a family-sized bottle of soda and two sides of garlic bread because it freezes well from this particular place and he and Bucky both fucking love garlic bread. Besides which, it would be rude to consume garlic bread now, when he knows Bucky’s going to be home in the next couple of days. Bucky has a nose like a bloodhound (although actually, technically, chronologically, bloodhounds have noses like Bucky) and as much as he loves garlic bread, he doesn’t need it breathed at him in the middle of _‘glad you’re home’_ sex, Steve’s sure. 

Plus it gives them both something else to look forward to once the first rush of adrenalin/endorphins/hormones et al wear off. 

He looks at what he wants most versus what he’s going to need eventually, and what will be easier to force himself to eat in the middle of the night tonight, and it’s not even a competition. He likes Hawaiian - has ever since he tried it because, hello, he lived in Brooklyn in the 30s. He’d never even _seen_ a real pineapple until he woke up in this century. He likes veggie, for similar reasons - Sam calls him all sorts of names for it but, being able to get fresh greens and crunchy accents and juicy olives and all sorts on a _pizza?_ Steve loves it. Loves sliced onion and sun-dried tomato and slivers of avocado and arugula in droves. But let’s be perfectly honest - there is one thing his desperate, horny body is screaming out for, and that’s _meat on cheese_ , preferably with so much gold and crimson fat oozing from the cheese and pepperoni that it ends up all over his chin - he does not give a single fuck tonight. He won’t be eating past lunch tomorrow anyway - that way his body can be Bucky’s for as long as Bucky needs it (and he can give it to Bucky for as long as he needs to, lets not pretend Steve doesn’t love it just as much as Bucky does). He’s going to save at least one set of fries and probably the white and the vegetable for the middle of the night. He can always taste the barbecue for a long while afterward, so he might as well do it when he’s still got a full 8 hours of sleep ahead of him (or however many he’ll be getting tonight).

He closes the boxes on the white and the veggie, and stows them in the oven. He opens the soda so it can go flat by tomorrow, because neither of their metabolisms are a fan of that much bubble but they both have an incurable sweet tooth, and then he shuts the boxes on the Hawaiian and the barbecue to stack them with the open meat feast on top of. Then his bag of fries and his three-stack of pizzas can go with him to the couch where he will sit quietly and eat his pizza and conserve energy. He will also try not to fall into a cheese-induced sleep, at least until it’s actually meant to be time to sleep. He still says grace, despite what’s going on in his life, and then does his utmost to savor the seven different meats as he consumes his pizza (seriously, seven kinds - Brooklyn pizza is the best pizza, period) instead of hoovering it up like an errant vacuum cleaner. 

He stops halfway through to move onto the barbecue, in the desperate hope that, by the time he’s had half of _that_ and then half the _Hawaiian,_ he’ll be able to go back and eat for pleasure instead of because his body needs the calories. Then he puts on the television, hoping something will distract him enough to slow him down. 

All that really happens is he gets mesmerized by a nature program about corals, and finishes the barbecue pizza before he realizes what he’s done. Welp.

~

If it was hard to get to sleep without Bucky before, the last night is always the hardest. It’s like being a kid on Christmas, or trying to get some shut-eye en-route to a mission they know will be a total shitshow. The faster Steve gets to sleep, the sooner he’ll see Bucky - it’s the same mantra he runs on a loop in his head every night Bucky’s away. It still doesn’t make much difference. He lies on his back in the bed-pit with semi and a top-sheet, and stares at the ceiling until his eyes water. He flips over onto his stomach and hugs the pillow that smells like Bucky and shuts his eyes and steadies his breathing and he’s still wide-awake and breathing steadily twenty minutes later when he checks what time it is on his phone. 

Twenty minutes. 

He could go to the gym to run off energy, he thinks, but he’d need to get up and get dressed and go down there and do the exercise and then shower and come back and get undressed and settle down (although, let’s be honest, he’ll skip the shower) and it will take _time_ and time is _wasting_ because the sooner he gets to sleep, the sooner he’ll see Bucky. 

This is like getting to the train station early because you left with time to spare and traffic was way better than you thought it would be, and so you’re standing on the platform for twenty minutes instead of five. You’re used to waiting five. Maybe even ten! Sometimes (often) it’s late and you stand there for longer than you expected, but after ten minutes your feet start to itch and you start to crane your next to see down the line because, sure, the train’s not due for another ten minutes but you’ve _been here_ ten minutes already and you’re ready to get on board now.

Steve turns onto his side and frowns at the window, at the way the light spills in from the sparkling city. He didn’t black the glass out - he wants to wake with the sun tomorrow and start his day right. Plus, sometimes the darkness is oppressive, and he doesn’t want to risk it tonight, with his mood already the way it is. So he’s left it, and there isn’t darkness in here, not really. The dull peach-colored glow of the city, the accumulation of lights in varying tones of whites and orange, paints the carpet, each individual tuft of it. He could count the tufts of the knap if he wanted to, enough pillows under his head that he’s basically level with the floor outside the bed-pit, each one looking like a tiny little mountain in a vast mountain range, or the tops of evening clouds, like they see from the quinjet when the sun begins to set. 

Wanda, who has spent a great deal of her time being like a little sister to Steve, has done a great deal to help him with a fair few of his issues, not the least of which was his propensity to breathe too hard when he’s worked up. He’s doing it now - he becomes aware of it and then instantly becomes unable to ignore it, trying to let his tongue down from the roof of his mouth, trying to unclench his jaw, trying to breathe with his mouth open and then trying to figure out if he breathes with his mouth and nose together or if it’s more like he breathes in through one and out through the other.

Okay. He knows how to do this. 

Just in for a little while, and then hold, and then out for a little while, and wait. Around and around in a square - he counts to four in his head with each part of the cycle, and then he looks out at the sea of lights before him. Bucky will come home to him, soon. And sure, he misses Bucky’s dick. But, more than that, he misses Bucky’s laugh, Bucky’s smile, Bucky’s sense of humor. He misses the warmth of Bucky by his side, the shared jokes, the sparkle in his eyes. He misses Bucky’s voice, Bucky’s hands, the closeness they share and the love that never fades between them. He misses the man he loves. 

He begins to count by using the little bumps of the nap of the carpet, painted at the edges with bright orange light, lit like snow by a warm, cozy building, the soft orange glow spilling toward him.

In, _two, three, four._ Hold, _two, three, four._ Out, _two, three, four._ Hold, _two, three, four._

Each little row, until he loses his place and has to start again. He starts from a different place, but his eyes skip ahead, and he loses his place again. Each of the little bumps, the thousand million sparkling lights. In, _two, three, four._

 __Hold, _two, three, four._

Out, _two, three, four._

Hold, _two, three , f o u r -_

_Bucky is leaning, as casual as you like, against the lamppost at the end of their street. It’s a summer night, because New York was always balmiest in summer, but the place doesn’t stink like it used to, and there’s nobody else on the street. It’s like a Grimshaw and a Hopper got together with a Vermeer - there’s Bucky, a work of art in a slice of light, his eyes dark and the tip of a cigarette glowing between his fingers before he raises it to his lips._

_“Took your time,” he says, but he’s smiling, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his brylcreemed hair styled perfectly as always._

_He pushes off the lamppost with a redistribution of his weight, so that he doesn’t need to take his other hand out of his pocket, and he flicks his cigarette away into the gutter with one fluid movement as he does. He would never, of course, have done that. On the wage they made in those days, Bucky’d sometimes only smoke a half a cigarette in the evening if he smoked any of one at all, but the little red spark cartwheels away into the darkness and disappears so that it might never have been there at all._

_“Didn’t see you last night,” Steve says, and he’s small again._

_Bucky hasn’t put them in London, or in uniform. It’s just Steve and Bucky outside their building in Brooklyn - before old Adolf was even thinking about it._

_“Hadda work through,” Bucky answers, sauntering forward._

_Steve’s tired of the charade, parts of him ache when they’re apart, and not just the blue ones._

_“I missed you,” he says, hastening his step just a little to meet Bucky halfway, throwing bony arms over Bucky’s shoulders so they can kiss._

_Bucky doesn’t taste of cigarettes; he tastes of himself, and Steve’s glad, (though, even if he’d never tell a soul, he sometimes misses the acrid taste of those asthma cigarettes on the back of his tongue). It was a simpler time, but there’s nothing simpler than kissing Bucky - nothing that means more to him either._

_“How was today for you?” Bucky asks, and Steve shakes his head, shuts his eyes._

_He doesn’t need to play it back on a mental showreel so Bucky can see - Bucky already knows._

_“Difficult,” he says._

_“Mm,” Bucky answers through another kiss. “Well,” and then has to pause for another one, “I’ll be home tomorrow. It won’t be long now, you’ll see.”_

_“Why d’you think it took me so long to get here in the first place,” Steve grouches, but there’s no heat in it._

_“I was starting to think I’d have to leave before you showed,” Bucky answers, and then kisses him and kisses him._

_It can’t actually be hours, but time seems to stretch around them, elastic._

_“Come on,” he says. “I don’t have long - I’m on second watch. Let’s go inside, you’ll catch your death out here.”_

_Steve frowns at him in the dark, balmy summer air, and follows Bucky up the steps and off the street._

_“What the hell are you talking about?” he says, and immediately it starts to rain behind them, as though it had been raining the whole time and someone had just switched them with a different universe._

_They’re protected by the landing for the next apartment up, just like the next landing up is by the next floor, and the next floor is by the one after that, but the hiss of the rain is enough to drown every other thought out of Steve’s head._

_“Let’s get you out of those wet clothes,” Bucky tells him, though Steve is positively bone dry, and Steve just laughs quietly and follows him inside to where the wireless is already playing and the stove is already warm._

_Bucky tugs him over to the couch and sits him down - he knows the door’s closed and locked behind them, although neither of them even touched it - and then they’re sitting on the couch together, facing each other, like they’ve both just finished a hard day of work at the docks and the bookkeeper’s and come home to each other. Like a summer night seven decades ago that feels like a million years. It felt like a dream at the time, and it really is one now, but Bucky’s hands are just as slow and gentle as they were then when they unfasten the buttons of Steve’s shirt, when they slide his suspenders down his arms._

_Steve’s arms come up around him when Bucky kisses him this time, and Bucky encourages him to fall backwards until they’re both flopping down together in the soft, gentle pillows of the bed-pit._

_“It’s late, my love,” Bucky murmurs against his lips, and Steve threads his fingers through Bucky’s hair to find that it’s long and luscious instead of short and slicked-back._

_“I know,” Steve answers. “I’m glad you’re here.”_

_Bucky’s eyes narrow a little, he glances off to one side._

_“Hm,” he says. “You say that now.”_

_Steve laughs._

_“Whaddya mean?” he says, and Bucky cocks his head._

_“Today was difficult for you, huh?” he says, his hand drifting lower on Steve’s abdomen._

_The undershirt Steve’s wearing disappears as he does, so that Bucky’s fingers brush bare skin between the open halves of Steve’s shirt._

_“Yeah, no kiddin’,” Steve answers, scraping his teeth over his lower lip as his body comes awake under Bucky’s touch. “You gotta be careful - I went too far yesterday, I’m gonna go off like a rocket if you don’t watch it.”_

_“Mmm, I can tell,” Bucky nods, his voice low. “Let me help with it. I’m sorry about this.”_

_Steve frowns at him._

_“What?” he says._

_Bucky holds up the bag of peas Steve was contemplating this afternoon, for exactly the same reason._

_“When you wake up, go make some pasta,” he says as Steve feels his eyes go wide, and Bucky ducks in for a brief kiss as he shoves the peas down between them. “I’ll be home before you know it.”_

Steve wakes with a _yelp_ of genuine pain and clamps both hands down over his dick - which is just about down to its normal size. It is ridiculous that he is both well-aware that sensation only happened in the dream, and somehow still stinging from the residual _ice-fuckin’-cold_ of it. 

“I’ll make some goddamn _pasta,_ ” Steve grumbles, like I'll show _you,_ ’ but Bucky was right - he was so late to sleep that it really is time to carb load before he tries to get the second half of his night in. 

At least he’s got those other pizzas, he supposes. 

~ 

Steve eats carbs until he cannot eat carbs any more. He eats his pizzas, he finishes his fries, he makes pasta and eats that too. He eats until he feels like he’s gained weight, and then he waits a half hour, and then he lies down on the couch, because he’s pretty sure he’s gonna pop if he tries to get back in the bed-pit. 

“Ugh,” he says to nothing in particular, and considers doing his best to stay awake until he falls asleep naturally, instead of trying to get back to sleep right now. 

If he stays awake for long enough, he reasons, eventually he’ll just pass out, and then he can sleep the whole day away instead of waiting for Bucky to get back and having the hours drag like a lead cape. 

It’s a reasonable thought, and there’s only one problem with it - if he isn’t rested, Bucky won’t get nearly enough of what he needs. Sure, he can follow Steve into the dreamscape and fuck him there, but it still takes energy. That’s literally what Bucky’s consuming. So if Steve waits until he’s drowsy to fall asleep, and then falls asleep, and hasn’t slept for long enough by the time Bucky gets back, well, it has the potential to ruin everything. Or, at least, take a great deal of the enjoyment out of it. 

Besides which, Steve _wants_ to be well rested, he _wants_ to give his body and his pleasure over to his husband, he _wants_ to give Bucky what he needs. Bucky can take what he needs from others if he can’t get it from Steve - of course he can, just like Steve can go to Thor or Clint or Nat if he has to. It’s a necessity, they both understand that. But Steve knows it tastes sweeter coming from him, that it works better coming from him. And even if Bucky hadn’t told him as much, he’d know it because the feeling’s mutual. 

So he finishes up his pizza, and finishes up his pasta (only marveling a little at the fact that it takes less than an hour - this body really is something else), and he goes back to bed. 

He does his breathing exercises, and by now, it would seem, full of food and woken halfway through the night, he can calm himself a little with the same thing that was working him up before - Bucky is coming home tomorrow. _Today,_ technically. Bucky is safe, and well, and Steve will see him soon. Yes, he’s so excited he could burst, yes, he’s missed Bucky like hell, but something unwinds in his chest with the knowledge that everything will be right with the world by lunchtime, and all Steve has to do is be here. The rest is bound to happen the same way the sun is bound to rise. 

***

Steve has - quite possibly - the slowest morning he has ever had in his entire life, and he is a man who has experienced multi-plane shifts, cryogenic suspension, and actual magical enemies who have literally pulled time to a stop.

It is matched - only possibly - by every other damn time Steve has had to sit and wait for Bucky to get back. If Bucky being away from him is like arriving early at the train station, this is like wading through molasses, or not knowing when your parcel’s going to arrive, or that time in ‘29 when he headed all the way into Manhattan for an interview to discover they’d rung to change his interview time (a problem given that Steve and Bucky did not have a telephone), and he’d had to spend his whole afternoon sitting right there in the lobby because he’d only had enough money to get there and back, and didn’t have time to make the journey twice. 

It had been _excruciating._ And it is _nothing_ on this. 

Steve wakes properly at five-thirty, because of _course_ he does, and he heads down to the gym to go running on the treadmill. There is literally no way - not even with the early morning temperatures - that he can go running outside where people might see him. He screwed up monumentally, he really did - he gets maybe a mile and a half before he thinks about Bucky, and then he’s thinking about Bucky standing in the middle of the living room while sunlight pours through the windows, the way it makes a halo of his hair, the way the shadow’s cut by the glory of his smile and the light in his eyes. And then he’s running with a semi, at least, battering the fuck out of it against the tops of his thighs. 

He makes it another mile before he has to stop, and he’s not even gotten his heart rate up yet - at least, not through exercise. He has a second or two think that maybe his dick being bruised might actually help, except he’s just run a mile and a half and it still hasn’t quit, so he’s not sure how effective that particular theory is going to prove.

He walks for a while instead, and tries counting his steps, but all that does is give time for the sting to fade, and then he’s got exactly the same problem he had before. 

“God,” he mutters, slowing the treadmill to a stop and leaning heavily on the control panel for a second.

It’s been a while since he screwed up the schedule - he’d forgotten what a fine line he was walking. It’s not like he can’t think of anything that isn’t Bucky, and sex, and sex with Bucky, it’s just that his brain stops wanting to. He could work out tactics if he needed to, and probably without distraction. He could do a crossword or run an obstacle course - he _could._

But he’d also quite like Bucky to be balls deep in him right now and the thought is very, _very_ appealing. 

Bucky’s going to take a lot from him this afternoon, which is exactly what Steve wants him to do, and it’s difficult to think about what time it is (still way too early) and what his schedule has to look like (way, way too empty) when his head is full of imagining scenarios Bucky can weave in the dreamscape. Binding him up with ropes so that all his limbs are pulled back and all the lines of his body are followed with soft cotton and the only thing jutting out of the knotted cocoon is his cock, or laying him down in a bed of soft grass and making love for hours under the milky way while the tiny light of fireflies wink around them, or stripping him naked in the middle of a candlelit void while he floats in mid-air under silk sheets - all of these they’ve done, of course. Steve can’t think of anything new, but he doesn’t need to think of anything new. What he needs is not to be thinking of Bucky’s forked tongue flicking millimeters away from the glistening head of his dick, while Bucky stares up at him with his pointed teeth bared in a smile.

Steve does not want a cold shower. Something very high up on the list of things he loathes is ‘cold showers,’ and with good reason. Not because of the years he spent in ice but because of the years he spent getting pneumonia, and because his body is particularly sensitive since the serum. 

And yet, here he is, thinking of the time Bucky gave him a clitoris and then tied him open and vibed him to orgasm after orgasm until he _cried_ , so it looks like, yep, a cold shower is on the schedule.

Every time he thinks he can’t get any harder, every time he thinks there’s no more blood to go to his dick, it proves him wrong and throbs with an ache he doesn’t dare try to press off like he did yesterday. The first time he thinks he can, he proves himself wrong by shoving his hips forward against his hand like he’s got no control so.

Ah, God, cold shower it is.

~

It does, at the very least, tamp down his immediate and bubbling arousal. It leaves him swearing and shivering in the shower stall, but it also leaves his testicles somewhere around his throat on the inside, and his good mood very clearly out of the window.

He somehow feels wetter after a shower like that, like how your clothes feel heavier and clingier in winter rain than they do in summer rain. It’s certainly no hardship to link the feeling with the childhoods he spent shivering in bed - he tries his best not to be pissed off about it. It is, after all, his own fault that he needed a cold shower.

But he can’t help the grouchiness. He actually uses a hair-dryer to dry his hair, because they have one but don’t usually bother with it, and then he puts about four layers on his top half and puts a clean pair of compression pants on under his sweatpants, plus socks and slippers. Then he grabs a blanket and sits on the couch until his thoughts wander not ten minutes later, and he’s imagining the nights they used to spend huddled under the bedclothes in Brooklyn, when Bucky’s breath and his would form clouds together in the frigid air while the gasped silently in-

“Goddamn it,” he mutters, and stands up. 

He looks around.

He can’t exercise because it doesn’t engage his brain. He can’t read or watch TV, because it doesn’t engage his body. 

“What the fuck,” he says, because it’s….

Okay, it’s not even seven in the morning yet and he’s tearing his hair out. He actually feels like he might _literally_ start tearing his hair out - anything to distract him from his body, which has not had what it wants or needs in way to long. Which is hilarious. He used to be able to go months. 

He reaches this point every time, of course. It’s a completely different kind of terrible if he’s the one out on a mission - the adrenaline of a fight, or the pent-up energy of a failure or a false alarm heighten his senses and work him up just as much, albeit coming from a totally different place.

The problem is, usually he’s at this point because he’s spent an hour or so prepping before Bucky gets home, and _also_ usually, he’s not at this point until there _is only_ an hour or so before Bucky gets home. 

Any other time, he’d be picking which toys to use and deciding what meals they’ll have after and thinking about where he’s going to lie in the bed-pit and how close he’ll be when Bucky walks through the door. Right now though? Right now he’s had a cold shower, Bucky’s a good five hours out, and he can still feel the rush of heat on the inside of his poor freezing cold dick that signals how ineffective a cold shower is against the serum. 

“Jesus, Bucky, get home already,” he groans, and scrubs his face with his hand. 

Bucky will be here when it’s time for him to be here, and will probably have to debrief first.

Steve pictures Bucky stripping sensually out of his jersey boxer briefs, lip caught between sharp teeth, and hears his own half-hysterical noise of desperation made muffled and fractured by the fact that he’s shoving his face into his hands as hard as he can.

Okay, there _has_ to be something he can do. There has to be some way he can engage himself, body and mind both, and he lifts his head and looks around the place, trying to breathe steadily, and trying to lower his heart rate, and trying not to let the mounting frustration spiral into an awful cycle of want-but-can’t-have.

One of last night’s pizza boxes is on the counter-top, next to the salad tongs, which he used to grab the drained pasta from the colander the night before.

Okay. 

The dishes.

He can just….prep their meals and do the dishes, right? Just cook and do the dishes and pass some time. 

And then the place will be a little tidier, Steve will have a lot less pent-up frustration, and neither of them will have to worry about what to eat or how bad the place looks should anyone decide to visit.

***

_“Commander,”_ Jarvis says, through the little counter-top outlet they have for him.

They don’t like to have surveillance in the place, but they’re happy to have the one little output device. It glows blue when Jarvis speaks through it. 

Steve, wearing bright yellow rubber gloves because he’s doing the dishes, because he needed to do them after he prepped their evening meals, which is when he discovered the fridge needed cleaning out, and so cleaned out the refrigerator and then had to use the bathroom and so washed the windows and scrubbed the sink, and then figured he could maybe change some bedsheets over and then folded the laundry he’d forgotten about, and then went to put it away and organized the shoes in the closet because he tripped over one and then did the shirts and jackets because he’d done the shoes, and then found the box of sex toys they don’t usually use and had to go back into the main room so he didn’t think too hard about it and realized he still hadn’t done the dishes, turns his head to look at the Jarvis output appliance. 

They call it “a Jarvis” and Tony _loathes_ that they do so.

“Yeah?” he says, trying not to hope too hard 

“Fiinţă Barnes and party are currently coming in to land at the top of the tower, and should be through their debrief in approximately twenty-five minutes.”

“Oh, _fuck_ yes,” Steve says, yanking off his rubber gloves and getting suds everywhere while not caring _at all_. “Thank you, Jarvis.”

“My pleasure, Commander,” Jarvis answers, and even hearing the word ‘pleasure’ makes Steve’s blood buzz. 

Steve yanks his shirts off over his head as he jogs to the bathroom. Personal hygiene first, prep second, and then all he has to do (please, God,) is wait for Bucky to walk through the door. 

It becomes a problem almost instantly.

As soon as the shower is running, and Steve knows it isn’t cold this time, his dick perks up again. What if Bucky was in the shower with him, what if Bucky gets home early and surprises him in the shower, what if Bucky walks in on him prepping himself, what if Bucky fucks into him from behind while he rolls Steve’s nipples between his clever fingers?

He doesn’t need to scrub himself clean but he does it anyway, hoping the sting of his skin will distract him a little from the way his cock is raring to go.

Getting clean isn’t something you can rush, he knows that, but if he weren’t horny as fuck already, the rush of warm water inside of him would do it. He gets fully hard from that alone, and bites his lip and pays attention to every movement because he _will_ try and grab it to keep the edge off, and he _will_ go off like a rocket as soon as he does. 

In fact, if he isn’t _very, very_ careful, he’s going to come anyway. 

He feels like every nerve is attached to his cock - he runs a hand through his hair and pictures Bucky’s hands and shivers, he brushes at an itch on his flank and imagines Bucky’s embrace. His dick is _up,_ and there doesn’t seem to be any way it’s going to flag. 

When he’s done, before he gets out of the shower, he considers turning it down to cold and blasting his cock with it, but he knows he won’t have the willpower to direct cold spray at his poor dick, and so aims the water at it and puts his hand on the dial instead, ready to turn it down to cold as soon as he gathers the nerve.

Except that, in the two seconds it takes him to register how fucking amazing it feels, his knees buckle just a bit and he nearly blows the whole plan.

God, he wants Bucky to blow him right now. 

He gets out of the shower and dries himself off cursorily, because anything besides that is going to ruin everything. His nipples are hard and sensitive, his dick throbs steadily in time with his heartbeat, his balls are already drawn tight against his body, and he keeps clenching down on nothing every time he pictures getting railed by Bucky and his incubus dick.

He has ten minutes. 

Ten minutes in which to prep and hold back - just ten minutes. That’s all.

He can totally do this. He can absolutely manage this, he’s going to make it, Bucky is ten minutes away from him.

He drops his towel on the bathroom floor and goes over to the bed-pit and, ten points to Steve Rogers, can’t find the fucking lube in all the fabrics and cushions for a good two and a half minutes, so by the time he gets some in his hand he’s got just over seven to go. 

He gets on his hands and knees because it’s easier, presses his chest to the mass of pillows and blankets and cushions and fabrics and spreads his knees while he rubs his fingers into his palmful of lube with one hand and braces himself on the forearm of his other arm.

He has to go slow.

He has to go slow or he will hurt himself.

He starts with his index finger and sinks it in all the way to the knuckle and does not care how loud the noise he makes is. He clenches around his finger instantly, desperate - he hasn’t had anything substantial inside of him since yesterday and he does his utmost to avoid his prostate but it’s right there, it’s right there and he _could_ rub against it just a little. 

He doesn’t, he knows he’s done if he does, and Bucky’s less than ten minutes away, Bucky’s like six minutes away, maybe even five-and-counting. 

His second finger is never as easy as he wants it to be because _thanks, serum,_ but really, thanks serum because he’s never going to have to worry about how tight he is, that’s for damn sure. When he manages to wiggle the second in alongside the first, the rush of blood that comes with the burn of the stretch makes his hips stutter forward, and he accidentally shoves the head of his dick against the velvet cover of one of the cushions and has to go stock-still to stave off the sparks that ignite in his belly.

“Ohgod,” he chokes out, and then can’t move. 

He literally can’t move - the width of his two fingers in his ass are making his breaths come too fast, are making the head of his cock sting with the need to come. He counts to thirty, makes himself stay completely immobile for the full thirty seconds, and then tries to ease his fingers out.

The drag of the wrinkles of his knuckles against his hole make his cock blurt precome, and he spreads his two fingers because he’s not sure he can hold back long enough to get a third.

And then finally, 

thankfully,

blessedly, 

Steve and his super-hearing hear the latch of the front door.

“Where are you?” Bucky’s voice calls out, and Steve has to bite back a moan in response. 

His whole body reacts when Bucky speaks, his hair stands on end, his heart rate quickens, the aching pulse between his legs thumps harder, and Steve laughs into the cushion and then _yanks_ his fingers out because he doesn’t have the willpower to hold back if he goes slow.

“I’m,” he says, near enough gasping, his limbs shaking under him, “Bucky,” and he hears Bucky’s footsteps jogging down the corridor. 

Bucky, wanting, is almost visibly teetering on the edge of his patience. There aren’t actually heat waves coming off him, there’s no actual static in the air around him, and yet Steve _senses something._ It’s not visible, or audible, or touchable, but it’s there.

Bucky comes in and stops short in the doorway just as Steve turns over onto his back, and then, oh then.

“Fuck,” Bucky breathes, with such reverence that Steve feels himself blush, but his expression says something more.

He sounds like he can’t believe what Steve’s doing for him, but he _looks_ like his next move is to strip the meat from Steve’s bones and laugh while he does so. His eyes are dark and glittering, his teeth are pointed. He is bigger than human and he stares down at Steve in his person-form though Steve’s perception fills in the blank of his wings, where they would unfurl and stretch out and fill the space behind Bucky while Bucky _towers_ over him.

 _“Fuckin'_ git _down_ ’ere a’ready,” Steve breathes, and Bucky _grows_ , makes himself _bigger_ and pulls the other parts of himself in from the sister realm and tears the shirt off his body with a movement of his hands that so casual it looks like he made it disappear by magic, and rips the fly of his pants instead of undoing the zipper, fumbling for his cock as soon as his pants are open.

Steve knows his wings are there, that he just can't see them, because, when he spreads his legs as Bucky moves towards him, Bucky doesn’t so much drop to his knees as sink gracefully down - the way he might if he were being lowered on a rope, or sinking through water, and he reaches up and out to touch them because he wants to see the.

They appear in an unfurling of matter, like ink in water, when he makes contact, and Bucky grabs at him - Steve’s skin hums where Bucky touches it, a resonance that’s born of their existing together in synchronization, and he knows Bucky’s does exactly the same. They both groan about it, but then Steve’s lifting his head and their mouths are crashing together - Bucky’s teeth are sharp but they don’t cut, and the strength they meet with is bruising but neither of them cares.

Bucky grabs at Steve’s hips like he weighs nothing, and tilts them up with sharp-clawed fingers before one hand disappears between them.

“I’m here,” Bucky says, and Steve grabs for his head with both hands.

“Bout fuckin’ time,” he growls, and then Bucky’s shoving into him - long and slow and thick and ridged, and Steve feels the way his body stops holding it all back, the way his shoulders judder inward with each bump and ridge, how his body stretches around his cock, the way his head falls back as his spine arches, the way his mouth falls open as his lungs fight for air and Bucky goes and goes and fills him right up.

The base of Bucky’s dick swells as he keens, keeping him in place, locking them together. 

Steve takes one breath in that’s four little ones all broken up, that catches in his chest and scrapes up the back of his throat, and he gets one, single moment of crystal clarity - eye of the storm, silence before the shockwave - and then Bucky’s teeth are sinking into his throat and pleasure’s rushing through his veins and it’s terrifying, every time, exhilarating.

There’s no thought, no understanding, just pleasure so bright it’s blinding as it takes his own body out of his control, his body shaking through release, twitching and spasming and moving in ways he couldn’t stop if he tried as he cries out without restraint. 

Bucky starts his Feed - distantly, Steve can feel him. He can feel the pull of energy through him, the drag of pleasure like an anchor on the seabed of his sanity, he’s coming unmoored, floating in a void of it while Bucky keeps him safe, while what tethered him comes apart.

As the first orgasm fades, he recognizes the immersive indulgence of the Feed more clearly - Bucky is an Incubus. Bucky was _made_ for this, and he holds Steve in the fading afterglow while he drinks from the stores Steve has kept for him, because Steve was made for this, too.

His hands don’t work the way they should, falling away the longer Bucky’s at it, and he tries to grasp at Bucky’s head, his neck, his shoulders, his back, anything. He can’t bring his legs up around him, can’t pull his body closer (not that Bucky could get much closer) and it’s only the years of this that they’ve shared that let Steve keep his awareness of all of it. He knows he can’t fight it, he couldn’t _want_ to, but trying to bring Bucky closer, trying to be as active a participant as he wants to be, well that’s half the fun.

He’ll bruise and wear it proudly, though Bucky never breaks his skin. With everything he’s held inside of him, and how long Bucky’s been away from him, even without a true skin-piercing bite it’s still energy moving through him to Bucky, still a transfer of power through his existence, that will show itself in mottled pink and purple over the places where life flows through his veins.

He moans softly, lets the Feed carry him on the weightlessness of desire and satiation, and Bucky cradles him like a precious thing and drinks him down. 

“Bucky,” he tries, but the sound is blurred, out of focus when his lips refuse to form it. 

His skin is alight and his nipples sting and his cock is so hard and it _aches_ so deeply the ache is in his bones, and he can do nothing but lie where he is and wait for Bucky to give him more of it. 

He makes a wordless noise, his whole body shivering with it though he’s as far from being cold as he can remember, quaking under his skin with the intensity of it. It’s then that Bucky breaks from him, lifts his head and kisses him - soft this time, sweet and slow and gentle.

“I missed you,” he murmurs, and Steve isn’t forming words yet but he knows that he doesn’t have to. “You know how much I missed you.”

Steve, his lashes damp and his lungs trembling, makes another of those wordless sounds, and Bucky kisses it from his mouth and swallows it down.

“Ready?” he asks, and Steve pulls his chin down against his chest because it’s the only nod he can give, his limbs twitching inward as he puts all he’s got into holding Bucky back and fails. 

Bucky will take care of him, because doing this, giving this over, is taking care of Bucky.

“Good,” he says, his voice a growl, not entirely on this plane. “You’re so good to me.”

Steve feels he could shatter into different existences like this, as Bucky’s body moves in such a way as to light a sun in his center, the relief of the intensity such a contradiction even as it’s a comfort. 

And then it’s rising up in him again, desperate pleasure and an unbridled magnitude that only Bucky can see him through, and Bucky's there to guide him, every touch a brand, pleasure reverberating in every nerve like a singing glass. His orgasm is strong and deep and wrenches at his soul, the second of many, and Bucky is there with him, right where he should be.

***

They lie together, when the Feed is done, hours later that might as well be years. They’re not finished with each other’s bodies, but the first of it has passed, the desperation in it is over, Bucky is more human than he was because the part of him that Feeds is sated. Steve can feel how little he’s going to be able to move for the next few days, half-asleep already, but Bucky lies with him, contented and well fed, his head over Steve’s heart while Steve’s fingers wind through his hair.

“God, I missed you,” Steve mumbles, his speech not fully back yet, and Bucky lifts his head and grins sleepily. 

He isn’t tired, doesn’t need to sleep, but he is happy and satisfied, and those things look the same on him.

“You ready to go again?” he says. “I’ll go easy on you this time.”

Steve takes a large breath through his nose and smiles as he sighs.

“I belong to you,” he says softly. 

“Did you say all your pretty things for me?” Bucky asks, mouthing at Steve’s skin.

“For you?” Steve says, winding his fingers through soft strands, the knuckles still aching from clenching tight. “My Incubucky?” Bucky rolls his eyes but smiles all the same. “Yes.”

Bucky hums softly. 

“And did you believe them?”

Steve nods.

“Absolutely not,” he amends.

Bucky snorts.

“Can you list them for me?”

And Steve sighs heavily through his nose again. 

“I am a valid person,” he says, as monotone as he can. “And I have a valid dick.”

“Alright,” Bucky nods. “Those are both true.”

“Don’t worry,” Steve tells him. “I definitely believe those.”

“I can tell. ‘I deserve my gorgeous husband,’ ” Bucky says, propping himself up to look down at Steve. 

“I love my gorgeous husband,” Steve says, and Bucky smiles wide and white.

“You’re adorable,” he says. “I can smell you believe that one. ‘I deserve my gorgeous husband.’ ” 

Steve looks at him.

“I love you,” he says instead, and Bucky nods.

“I love you too,” he says. “Alright. ‘I did not work hard for my body but I work hard in my body.’ ”

“I did not work hard for my body and I work hard in my body,” Steve answers.

Bucky shakes his head, a wry twist to his mouth.

“ ‘My husband loves me more than life itself,’ ” he says, and Steve opens his mouth.

“My,” he says, but then shakes his head because the back of his throat aches. “Oh no, don’t do _that,_ I _missed_ you, you _know_ I know that, you know that too.”

Bucky smiles a little less widely, dropping Steve’s gaze for a moment. When he looks up, there’s something calculating about the way he’s staring. 

“ ‘I am a good person,’ ” Bucky says, “ ‘who is too hard on himself.’ ”

“I know you are but what am I?” Steve says, clenching his jaw, and Bucky laughs - his eyeteeth are still pointed.

“Alright,” Bucky says, soft and slow. “I feel like we’re going backwards - maybe you should put on those jeans I bought you, the indigo ones.”

Steve considers it. 

“My ass does look great in those jeans,” he says, and Bucky takes a deep breath in, eyes fluttering closed.

 _“Uhn,_ there it is,” he breathes. “At least you believe _that_ one.”

“I told you,” Steve answers. “I deal in facts.”

“ ‘My husband’s a smart guy,’ ” Bucky answers, and Steve chuckles.

“My husband’s a smart guy.”

“ ‘My husband makes good decisions,’ ” Bucky says. 

Steve narrows his eyes. 

“My husband makes good decisions,” he says, because he hates to admit it but it’s true. 

“ ‘My husband loves me’?” Bucky answers, and Steve sighs, pushes his fingers through Bucky’s hair.

“Yeah, my husband loves me,” he says, but this is a trap somehow, and he knows it.

“ ‘So he must have some general idea of what he’s talking about.’ ”

Steve shoves his tongue into his cheek for a moment.

“So he must have,” Steve says. “Some general idea of what he’s talking about.”

But he doesn’t believe it, and he knows Bucky can tell. 

Bucky stares at him.

“My husband is the love of all my lives, in this world and the next, and he is good, and kind, and steadfast. I love him more than life itself.”

Steve nods.

“My,” he says, but Bucky shakes his head. 

“No,” he says. “That was for me.”

Steve gapes at him for a few long seconds, and he can feel that he’s blushing, that his eyes are stinging, that the emotion of it is welling up inside him.

“Bucky,” he croaks. 

“Thanks for trying, anyhow,” Bucky says. “I can feel how hard you tried…yesterday?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yesterday, yeah.”

Bucky’s mouth ticks up at the corner. 

“So,” he says. “You look like you need to rest, at least from the Out-Here. What can I get for you?”

Steve wets his lips. 

“I,” he says. “I wa- I want- Uh.”

Bucky nods encouragingly. 

“Take your time,” he says. “We have forever.”

Steve doesn’t need to take his time. 

“I want the Harley,” he says, feeling unsteady with the anticipation of it. “And the rope, and the vibrator, and the plug, I want them, until I can’t any more.”

Bucky smiles like Steve’s hung the moon, like Steve said all those affirmation things after all, like this is the best news he’s ever heard. 

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, and then he scrapes his teeth over his lower lip as he curls around Steve’s consciousness and pulls Steve down with him into sleep, “pleasure’s all mine. ”

Eh, Steve thinks as he leaves the real world behind and starts to feel rope binding his limbs, his weight held by suspension, the bike idling between his legs and the stinging pleasure of the hum of the vibrator on his cock, the plug big, and thick, and heavy inside of him. 

More like fifty-fifty.


End file.
